Language Enlightenment

Sunday, May 22, 2016

January 1, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

By proposing to listen to ourselves while we speak, this writer aims to change the contingency of human interaction. He is not interested in changing the content of the conversation. The content can remain the same, what he cares about is that the context in which we speak is altered. The feedback loop created by hearing our own sound will surely change the content of our conversation. It will show us that the content cannot stay the same if we pay attention to how we sound.

We can always hear our sound, but if we listen to it deliberately, we will realize that we can only listen to others to the extent that we are listening to ourselves. If we ignore listening to ourselves, as we do in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), we can at best only pretend to be listening to others. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which we listen to ourselves, we listen to others in the same way as we listen to ourselves. Stated differently, in NVB, we listen to others in a different way than we listen to ourselves.

One way of listening occurs in SVB as a consequence of the verbalizer’s ability to focus on him or herself. Thus, in SVB the verbalizer and the mediator is one and the same person. However, in SVB verbalizers and mediators are also different people. SVB mediators understand verbalizers, because verbalizers do not put pressure on mediators to listen to them.

Verbalizers who listen to themselves while they speak will change the circumstances in which they speak. Change is brought about by the suggestion of this writer, who, due to his behavioral history knows that this will happen. He has tested this phenomenon many times. The reader can test it too. When a verbalizer, switches from not listening to him or herself to listening to him or herself, this verbalizer is going to talk in an entirely different way. Moreover, both the verbalizer and the mediator(s) will also acknowledge this. In other words, there will be agreement, understanding, validation and reciprocal reinforcement between the verbalizer and the mediator in SVB about what is said and how it is said.

The contingency change that occurs in SVB is a result of the behavioral change: listening to ourselves while we speak. By changing our behavior we change our circumstances. Yet, behavioral change is not done by some inner agent, who makes us listen to ourselves. The change that changes the contingency comes about because that part of the environment to which we only individually have access is expressed. Nobody can express this part for us. The mediator mediates the verbalizer only to the extent that he or she is one with the verbalizer. Only to the extent that the mediator can be his or her own verbalizer, will the mediator be capable of mediating the verbalizer as another person.

This poses two problems: 1) the mediator has never spoken to him or herself as a verbalizer or 2) the verbalizer has never mediated him or herself as a mediator. The first problem is a much bigger than the second one. There are many more people, who have never spoken, who have always basically only listened, than that there are people who don’t listen, but who speak all the time. Simply stated, most of the talking is done for us by a few others. If we take care of the first problem, the second one turns out to actually be a cover up of the first problem. We have heard so often, that listening is the problem, that people just don’t listen, but who is saying this? This is not said by those who have been listened to, but by those who people don't want to listen to, but who demand to be listened to. Those who tell others that they don’t listen, seem to have achieved some higher moral ground, but the fact is they determine the contingency for NVB.

In SVB we don’t tell each other that we must listen. In SVB listening is not the issue at all. In SVB speaking is the issue. Stated differently, we cannot and do not have SVB because of our lack of speaking. We have for the most part been taught to speak in a NVB manner and to the extent that we have been taught to have SVB, we experience constant problems because we find ourselves in environments in which it is impossible to speak the way in which we would like to speak. Consequently, we give up on our speaking or supposedly we ‘pick our battles’, but the bottom line is that we stop speaking, as we must protect ourselves from bad consequences.

Most people speak hesitantly when they experience the contingency, which brings their attention to the distinction between SVB and NVB. It is only after they experience this contingency for about half an hour, an hour, two hours or three hours that they begin to lose their hesitation and are feeling sure enough that it is possible and okay to continue with SVB. Repeated trials are necessary before people realize that they actually want SVB and not NVB. Initially, the distinction between SVB and NVB shows in what for an upside-down world we live in. It is embarrassing to realize that we are mostly conditioned by and familiar with NVB.

In his book “Running Out of Time” (Ledoux, 2014, p.262) Ledoux states “such bodies are also behaving organisms and, like all organisms, are limited to operantly and respondently conditioned responses that in one way or another change the environmental contingencies on another organism, human or other animal, and these contingency changes bring about change in the other organism’s behavior.” This author doesn't view himself as Ledoux, as ”behavior modifier” but as a “contingency engineer.”

His greatest challenge in pointing out the SVB/NVB distinction is that he can only point out so much at any given time. In order to change the operant and respondent conditioning processes, which maintain NVB, people have to become verbalizers, who recognize and acknowledge themselves as their own mediators. That this is accomplished without any effort demonstrates that it is the absence of an inner-behavior-controlling agent which makes SVB possible. This absence is experienced as freedom.

December 31, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M. S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) always works. This writer can always produce those words, which he enjoys to write. If he would be writing words that have a negative effect on him, he would be putting himself down, but he is not inclined to do that. The careful weighing of what he is going to write gives him peace of mind, because how he talks with himself makes him feel good. When he finds himself thinking negatively about people, situations or things, which are not pleasant, he avoids writing about it. He could write about them, but he chooses not to. He writess about reinforcing matters.

If he would write whatever ‘came to his mind’, he would write a lot of nonsense, which would negatively affect him and others, but he rather writes something that makes him and others feel good, that will be read because it makes sense. If these words can’t make sense to those who happen to read them, he doesn’t even want to write them. Any reader can understand that this writer is simply talking with himself. However, the reader also knows that this writer’s private speech becomes public speech and that he simultaneously talks with the reader. What this writer doesn’t want to write about is part of his private speech, where it disappears, because it doesn’t have any relevance to public speech. It is not that this writer doesn’t want the reader to know about it, but that he knows it would be bothering the reader as much as it does him. This writer selects what matters to himself and to the reader and chooses to only write about what matters to both. The reader too constantly selects what private thoughts or feelings are expressed in his or her public speech.

Many of the private thoughts and feelings of the reader, which are not expressed in his or her public speech, don’t disappear and consequently greatly trouble the reader. The reader often finds him or herself thinking about such thoughts and feelings, which don’t go away and seem to be having a life of their own. This writer wants to let the reader know that he or she is right with regard to not wanting to express his or her private thoughts and feelings in public speech. Whenever the expression of these private thoughts and feelings led to the breakdown of public speech, this surely had negative consequences for the reader. Although not expressing these private thoughts and feelings may have led to the continuation of public speech, they also led to the fact that the reader began to feel negative about having these thoughts and feelings. Each time the reader was given the signal that expressing such thoughts and feelings was more negative than not expressing them, he or she began to feel more negative about him or herself. The process here described, however, is very different from the one this writer is going through. This writer is no longer bothered by not expressing what he thinks and feels. His ability to not express his private thoughts and feelings in his public speech is a relief. One could say that he has developed in such a way that this is now possible. Because the reader has not gone through the development this writer has gone through, the reader is impaired by spoken communication in which he or she is incapable of expressing what he or she thinks and feels. This writer refers to such a spoken communication as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). He has attained SVB, in which what he thinks and feels is expressed and reinforced often enough to be aware of the effects of NVB. He invites the reader into SVB, in which thoughts and feelings, private speech, can become part once more of public speech.

The reader probably believes this writer is deciding to write like this, because he has explained why he writes like this. Yet, this writer wants to educate the reader that such a belief is completely wrong. The fact that most people would agree with the reader and not with the writer, doesn’t determine whether the writer decides to write like this or not. What determines the correctness of the statement that this writer decides to write like this is a functional analysis of why he writes like this.

This writer doesn’t write in Russian, because he has no behavioral history with Russian, he writes in English, because he has a behavioral history with English. From this English conditioning, this writing is not decided in any kind of way, it simply happens, naturally. That he uses certain words and not others is determined by touching buttons on a keyboard and by making words appear in front of him on the screen. This is the only way in which we know what deciding means: we behave in a certain way. In the case of private speech regarding our thoughts and feelings, others don’t have access to something to which we only ourselves have access. In other words, we may know how we behave, while others don’t and can’t.

We only know how we behave if we have talked with ourselves and have let ourselves know that this is what we really think and feel. Only if we, as speakers, are our own mediator, do we come to know about this. Only if we listen to ourselves, while we speak, do we realize that there are two ways of behaving verbally: SVB, in which our public speech is understood as causing our private speech and thus always includes it, and NVB, in which our private speech is believed to be causing our public speech and thus excludes it. We learn to speak from members of our verbal community and we all start with SVB, but we become conditioned by NVB as our private speech becomes excluded from our public speech. When SVB public speech naturally recedes into SVB private speech, it doesn’t create NVB. SVB public speech always leaves us with SVB private speech.

December 30, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) can be done alone, while writing or while talking out loud or it can be done together, while speaking or writing to others. The absence of others creates a contrast which is appreciated by this writer. There is no inner self that does the talking, only a body whose structure was changed over time by respondent and operant conditioning, by antecedent and postcedent stimuli, due to which this writing, reading, speaking and listening to these words became possible.

This writer lives with and doesn't complain about the scientific fact that there is no self. For many years he was involved in a spiritual search for what he believed to be ‘his true self’, but once he became familiar with behaviorism, the goal he had been pursuing became irrelevant. This plain scientific behavioral perspective is more definitive than any guru could have ever told him. It demolished the nonsense everybody lives by and it brought everything back to how we behave verbally. A new perspective is now unfolding.

This writing is not done by a person called Maximus. The fact that things change and keep changing is something that is takes our attention away from Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), our common way of talking. Since we are not talking that much anymore and since we are mainly watching TV or are reading words from paper or screens, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), our natural way of talking, is happening much less often. There was a time we were more involved in SVB, because our environments stimulated us. This writer creates such environments in which we can again have SVB.

December 29, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Many people have described this writer as ‘spontaneous’. It became clear to him why he didn’t like to be described that way anymore. Although it is a positive description, it made him feel he was not taken serious. In his series “On Verbal Behavior” The Fourth of Four Parts” (2005) Lawrence E. Fraley writes “People do not spontaneously initiate any of their own behaviors, whether public or private. The putative capacity to do so is a fictitious cultural endowment. In nature, nothing happens spontaneously. Spontaneous is an adjective of ignorance. It indicates that its verbalizer is not, perhaps cannot, specify the independent variable (s) in the functional relation (s) through which the specified dependent variable is manifesting.” Although people have called him spontaneous, they saw something for which they had no good explanation. They thought that the author was causing his own behavior and they had absolutely no clue of what his lively behavior was a function. Their pre-scientific thinking couldn’t stimulate them to look for and find the environmental variables which caused this author’s well-being. The fact that he never caused his own behavior, that nobody causes his or her own behavior, is missed by everyone because hardly anyone is capable of teaching it.

Since all things in the natural world happen because they can happen and not because some imaginary agent makes them happen, a functional analysis reveals that all behavioral responses are controlled by stimuli in the external or the internal environment. One of B.F. Skinner’s great contributions was that the environment on both sides of the skin is one. Antecedent stimuli can therefore be endo- environmental, that is, on the inside of the skin and ecto-environmental, that is, outside the skin.

Fraley (2005) hypothesizes about a “nonverbal consciousness” in which “any consequences of private neural responding would have to manifest naturally, without ever having been mediated by a verbal community.” Human beings are like other nonverbal animals, except they can also respond verbally. Due to pairing of nonverbal stimuli (i.e. visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, but also auditory) better verbal responses can be elicited. Although Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is not reinforced in most environments, it continues, because “no verbal community nor verbal practices would have been involved in the conditioning nor in the subsequent occurrence of that class of awareness or consciousness.”

SVB, the interaction in which our voice elicits more efficient, effective and refined verbal response forms, which are in the realm of social cohesion, art, aesthetics and spirituality, makes us truly verbal. To think of someone as having a thought or a feeling, is a product of NVB, in which private thought, which “shares in defining the person”, is excluded from public speech. SVB, by contrast, in which public speech is reinforced by private speech, and in which positive self-talk was reinforced by SVB public speech, is always at first only acknowledged by the individual, by the speaker-as-own-listener and only later by remote mediators.

Mediation by the same person, because it is immediate gets easily overlooked. The body of the person, who often experiences him or herself as the verbalizer and the mediator, is different from the body of the verbalizer, who only sometimes experiences him or herself as the mediator. The more the verbalizer experiences him or herself as the mediator, the more this will affect this verbalizer's subsequent verbal and nonverbal behavior and the subsequent verbal and nonverbal behavior of others. The refinement and acceleration, which happens in SVB is possible because of the alignment of a verbalizer's verbal and nonverbal behavior.

December 28, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the verbalizer and the mediator are not one and the same person, they cannot be. During NVB, the speakers don’t mediate themselves and are only mediated by others. Mediation of the speaker by him or herself is only possible if he or she listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. However, this is not done by the speaker, who decides to do this. Self-listening only happens, because the speaker was enough times in an environment in which he or she was able to do this, that is, if due to previous exposure the speaker’s body was changed at a micro-structural level in such a way that when he or she is again exposed to such an environment, he or she will produce such self-listening quite naturally and automatically.

This author has been many times in environments in which self-listening and SVB was possible. He enjoyed it so much and felt so compelled to be in it again and he was so happy to avoid NVB that he kept recreating and exploring it. When he first discovered the possibility of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the interaction in which verbalizer and mediator are one and the same person as well as different persons, he noticed that the conversation was totally different from the NVB he had been used to. What intrigued him about SVB was what Fraley (2005) described as “The only thing that can happen is exactly what always does happen.” The lawfulness of SVB and NVB was immediately clear to this author, but it wasn’t until he discovered behaviorism, the natural science of human behavior, that he realized that both response classes occurred as a natural function of environmental variables and not because of what one person, whether it be a verbalizer or a mediator, does or can.

This author refers to SVB as embodied communication, because the communicator’s restructured body shares “in the antecedent stimulus control of subsequent behaving by the same organism. “ Both SVB and NVB occur because our bodies are mostly momentarily, and seemingly, more permanently, changed by environmental variables. However, this energy transfer from one body structure to another is in a constant flux. That being said, “In the case of an ongoing train of thought, the behavior-controlling environment is inside the skin and consists of the preceding private neural behavior per se” (Fraley, 2005). Our negative or positive emotions sound differently and affect our bodies differently. NVB occurs due to how our body was affected by negative emotions, but SVB occurs due to how our body was affected by positive emotions.

Belief in thinking, which happens subconsciously, is perpetuated by NVB. Thinking said to go on privately inside the communicator’s skin, is always conscious, because it is “nothing more than a class of behavior that, like all behavior, is the inevitable result of certain functional relations having been established.” The fact that most people can’t explain their own or each other's behavior, is based on a belief, which is maintained by our way of talking. It is not “gainful employment” of a "nonexistent body-managing self-spirit” which maintains this belief, but unscientific communication.

NVB is based on the assumption that we can think of more than one thing at the same time. That “thinking that occurs to a person can occur through only a single channel of stimulation” and that “a person can think of only one thing at the time” is dismissed in NVB. “People are convinced they are consciously thinking of different things at the same time” while “in fact” they are “responding to those various events in rapid alternation.” SVB and NVB also alternate similarly.

Negative and positive emotions and NVB and SVB, do not and cannot occur simultaneously, but self-listening and other-listening co-occur, because other-listening is embedded in or emerging from self-listening. In NVB, in which other-listening is our focus, self-listening is excluded. Only in SVB does other-listening includes self-listening. In SVB, a child will be positively reinforced for its nonverbal expression. Even before the child becomes verbal, the child is already capable of having SVB. In other words, there is a pre-verbal or nonverbal foundation for SVB. The happy sounds of positive emotions that a child makes are usually reinforced. To the extent that this was not the case, the microstructural foundation for NVB was created in the earliest stages of the child’s development.

What we are capable of ‘learning’ during our lifetime is governed by our “neural responses” that in turn “depend heavily on our own respective conditioning histories” (Fraley, 2005). Thus, our knowledge is how our body responds privately. In effect, we “do not acquire knowledge but instead behave it for ourselves.” How we respond to certain stimuli is measured mainly by our verbal responses. This writer, however, wants to enhance learning by bringing attention to how we respond non-verbally. It is easier to follow a particular verbal train of thought when we are non-verbally attuned. Derailment of human relationship is due to our over-emphasis on verbal responding, due to which we overlook the importance of nonverbal responding. In SVB our attention for how we sound, for the nonverbal, makes what we say easier to be understood. Moreover, SVB enhances our well-being regardless of what we are talking about. Anxiety and stress involved in the belief that we can think of many things simultaneously, is totally absent in SVB, which heralds a new way of learning. SVB is based on positive feedback from the environment within and without our skin.