November 15, 2016

November 15, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my ninth response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” It should be clear to anyone reading this that the still pervasive stance in modern neuroscience that “automatically and autocratically precludes the study of how affective feelings are generated in animal brains” has nothing to do with how animals behave, but has everything to do with how humans behave.

The automatic, autocratic speaker is a blunt speaker who engages in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In other words, scientific development is halted by a particular way of talking in which the speaker dominates the listener. Such unscientific, forceful and biased speech should be controlled, but it continues to be accepted everywhere as long as we haven’t distinguished between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and NVB.

I predict that NVB will soon be recognized as the biggest obstacle to scientific progress. The SVB/NVB distinction explains dilemmas which neither Panksepp nor any other scientist has been able to address, let alone solve. As the “study of how affective feelings are generated in animals brains” is impaired by how we talk, the study of how affective feelings are generated in human brains is equally compromised.

Why do you think so “Many choose to ignore the likelihood that raw affective experiences—primal manifestations of “mind”—are natural functions of mammalian brains, which could serve as key empirical entry points for understanding the experienced reward and punishment functions of the human mind?” Since they understand that a construct as “the human mind” is an outdated explanatory fiction, behaviorists only talk in terms of operant conditioning and “reward and punishment.” This necessary definitional restriction of speech, which emphasizes the importance of what they say over how they say it, also prevents them from acknowledging the importance of the SVB/NVB distinction.