November 1, 2016

November 1, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my seventh response to “The Power of the Word May Reside in the Power of Affect” (2007) by Jaak Panksepp. According to Panksepp, the “more cognitive modes of communication” are “never completely liberated from the affective musical-motivational ground from which they arose”. We make more sense of what someone says if what we say sounds good, that is, if what we say is congruent with how we say it.

When what we say is congruent with how we say it we engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but if this is not the case we engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). As “propositional, logic-constrained, low affect speech consolidates within the left hemisphere”, while our “prosodic-emotional poetic stream flows more forcefully through the right”, we predict that if “cognitive arguments are divorced from the affective-rhetorical power of emotional convictions, one’s ability to understand language and to attract the cognitive attentions of others suffers.”

NVB, which is forceful and therefore effortful, cannot work as well as SVB, which is playful, flexible and effortless. Simply stated SVB works better than NVB. Research has shown over and over that “when right-hemispheric prosodic and reality-principles are damaged, the left-hemisphere’s story-lines become more superficial and disconnected from the deep affective needs and life-stories of people.”

It has been found that “when left-hemispheric propositional language becomes decoupled” (as it always does in NVB) “from affective values, it readily confabulates, becoming untrustworthy and less authentic – generation semantic towers of delusional babble, often in attempts to manipulate the minds of others.” Neurobiology makes the case for SVB.