November 14, 2015

November 14, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Student, 

This is a response to “Seeing with ears: Sightless human’s perception of dog bark provides a test for structural rules in vocal communication” (2009) by Molnar, Pongracz and Miklosi. Researchers “played prerecorded family dog barks to groups of congenitally sightless, sightless with prior visual experience and sighted people (none of whom had owned a dog)”. They found  “blind people without any previous canine visual experiences can categorize accurately various dog barks recorded in different contexts, and their results are very close to those of sighted people in characterizing the emotional content of barks.”

These research findings confirm the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)/Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction, as they “suggest that humans can recognize some of the most important motivational states reflecting, for example, fear or aggression in a dog’s bark without any visual experience.” There is no doubt that these findings “can be generalized to other mammalian species—that is, no visual experience of another individual is needed for recognizing some of the most important motivational states of the caller.” This research corroborates the biological basis for SVB and NVB.

“Several studies have reported more efficient perceptual  processing (e.g., shorter reaction times)in blind than in sighted people, both in auditory and in tactile discrimination tasks” (Kujala, Lehtokoski, Alho, Kekoni, & Naatanen, 1997; Roder, Rosler, Hennighausen, & Nacker, 1996). Naturally, blind people focus on hearing since they can’t see. Moreover, “Neurophysiological recordings have revealed similar neural changes in the blind to those observed in populations with a specific history of perceptual experience (e.g., musicians).”

My history of singing and listening preceded my discovery of the SVB/NVB distinction. My interest in written words for a long time was much lower than my interest in spoken words. And, I was only interested in spoken words if the speaker, according to me, sounded good. I was and I still am less preoccupied with visual stimuli as I was and am more open to auditory stimuli. These neurophysiological data tell me that I must have similar neural activity as the people who are blind. However, I am not blind.  I have that similarity to blind people when we talk. Why? I listen! “Both musicians (Pantev et al., 1998) and blind adults (Roder, Rosler, & Neville, 1999) show an enhanced excitability of neural systems important for auditory processing.” And, “Since blind people rely more heavily on auditory information, it has been argued that they should show superior memory for input delivered through this modality.” I don’t care very much about taking pictures or showing pictures of myself to others.  

This research gets very interesting as “Cobb and colleagues (Cobb, Lawrence,& Nelson, 1979) did not find any differences in long-term memory for environmental sounds, nor for common tactile objects, between sighted and blind adults.” These long-term effects can only become apparent when we ‘look’ for them. Only under certain circumstances is the listener turned off or turned on by the sound of the speaker. Stated differently, in NVB speakers induce negative affect, but in SVB speakers induce positive affect in the listener. However, these ethologist researchers are not behaviorists and, consequently, they write about people possessing “different memory strategies” instead of referring to selection of behavior by environmental variables. 

When “Contrary to sighted pupils, blind participants recalled words better if they heard them than if they generated them themselves” this was “attributed to” (presumably: caused by) “an impaired or less well elaborated semantic network, which was assumed to be a consequence of the lack of visual input in the blind.” Although we can go deeper and deeper into the metaphoric rabbit hole, no behavior is explained this way and we are left with imaginary constructs. “As blind people have to acquire many concepts through language with less or without direct sensory experience, Pring (1988) hypothesized that their semantic networks contain more abstract concepts. Furthermore, it was consequently argued that blind people prefer data-driven strategies.” However, if we go into the brain, we neither find a self, a concept, a semantic network nor a strategy. All of these are of course covert verbal behaviors which are functionally related, that is, caused by, overt behavior or public speech.

These researchers still mainly believe in the supremacy of the information-processing model of spoken communication. This is why they write that “Verbal information is considered as mostly referential for humans.” Presumably, verbal behavior is caused by and referring to something inside of us. However,  “Spoken words can carry additional affective information about the inner state of the speaker, but as humans also understand, for example, written text, it is clear that language mainly contains other than emotional (non-referential) information.” They do seem to realize the lack of explanatory power of the information processing model. Yet, not this model, but their ignorance about the SVB/NVB distinction, causes them to write “Contrary to human words, animal vocalizations were considered predominantly to be affective (inner-state-based) communicative signals.” Had they known about this distinction, they would have never written that “animal vocalizations” are different from “human words” because they are “affective (inner-state-based) communicative signals.” Human vocalizations, like animal vocalizations, are primarily affective. The many problems we have around expressing and understanding our own emotions are directly related to our unscientific assumptions about these so-called inner-states.

Although we may talk day in day out about our feelings, there is no entity, no self who possesses a feeling. Although we speak about having a language or possessing language skills, there is nobody inside of us owns these abilities. We find ourselves without words under certain circumstances in the very same way that we can only find ourselves with German words under German circumstances. The language we speak has nothing to with us, individually. The common belief that we cause our own behavior is a falsehood, which wreaks mental health problems of gigantic proportions. Shooting ourselves in the foot could be a good thing if it would make us aware about why we were doing that. We turn our theoretical, metaphorical gun on ourselves as there is nowhere else to aim than at our own head. The uni-directionality of what can be considered ‘gun-logic’ doesn’t and can’t explain the bi-directionality of the environment-organism relationship.

If we stop being carried away by ‘our’ words, by the “meaning” of ‘our’ language, it can become clear to us that all organisms produce different sounds under different circumstances. Humans sound very different too, depending on whether they are in a threatening or a safe situation. “Morton concluded that atonal, low-pitched signals bear aggressive meaning, while tonal and high-pitched signals express sub-ordinance or the lack of aggressiveness.” No matter how much language we acquire, we still sound like that. This biological account of how we sound is needed to make sense of why we talk the way we do. 

“As this observation was based on acoustic signals of several unrelated species, Morton therefore assumed that these rules could be “universal”, at least among mammals and birds.” Our vocalizations are not learned, ontogenetic processes, but they are innate, phylogenetic processes. “So in many species”, humans included, “such vocalizations seem to have a clear genetic basis and emerge during development without significant environmental influence.” There is, of course, “significant environmental influence” on how we sound. We sing sad or happy songs depending on our circumstances. If we were raised with love and care, we produce different sounds than when we were raised with harshness and neglect. No matter how much this is hidden by what we say, how we sound always informs us about our behavioral history. 

Stated differently, we produce higher rates of SVB, if we were securely attached, but we will produce higher rates of NVB, if we were insecurely attached. Certainly, our rates can differ and during our lifetime either our rates of SVB or NVB go up. “More recently several studies found that vocal signals of many species can be also strongly context specific, while they share probably the same motivational state.” These researchers keep assuming that “they share probably the same motivational state” in spite of the fact that these observed behaviors are already parsimoniously explained by classical and operant conditioning.