January 5, 2015

January 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing is done in the afternoon instead of in the early morning. Different circumstances make different stimuli available, which evoke different behavior. Some of this writer’s writings were accidentally deleted, but luckily he was able to retrieve the documents, because he had send his writings to a friend. Much of his writings would have been lost if he hadn’t shared it with someone. This writer is in a good mood, because he is having his writings nicely organized, which makes it easier to send it to others. He also feels more ready now to share his writings with others. This wasn’t always the case. He looks forward to sharing his work. 

He anticipates how others will respond to what he writes. He doesn’t want them to think that what they are reading is something he is saying to them. Rather, he wants them to realize that they are probably imagining that someone is talking to them while in fact they are only reading these written words.  They may have thoughts about what is written here, but these thoughts are not part of any conversation, they are part of them just talking with themselves and they are, perhaps, due to this writing, aware that these words are behaved by them. 

Since they are already talking with themselves covertly, privately, they might as well talk with themselves overtly, publicly. If they would use this text to talk with themselves overtly, they can hear their own sound while they speak. This writing is then an opportunity to experience Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) as one person. SVB can also be experienced by two or many persons, but usually this doesn’t last very long, because speakers are not familiar enough with it to be able to continue. We have SVB each time the circumstances are conducive to it, but usually we have no clue as to what exactly makes it possible. If we knew more accurately what makes it possible, we would have it more often, just because we could. 

The scientific explanation of behavior, that some antecedent stimulus evokes a response, or that some consequence either reinforces or punishes a response, or that some postcedent event increases or decreases behavior, easily leads people to conclude that they see or hear or otherwise notice the evocative stimulus or take note of the fact that their behavior has positive or negative consequences and then decide to respond. Although the dominant NVB culture perpetuates this fiction, our inner self-decider doesn’t exist.  Every night when we sleep in our bed, we are perfectly okay without such a behavior-managing agent. Sleep is better when we forget who we are. Our inability to do so causes us insomnia. One may argue, that we don’t need to behave in the night, that our busy, imaginary self can get a rest, but, when we consider the ingredients of dreams, which are just another kind behavior, we find all sorts of environmental independent variables that stimulate, reinforce, trigger, punish, shape and extinguish, our behavior, the dream, the dependent variable. 

Behavior is tremendously complex and besides the relatively simple three-term contingency, consisting of an evocative stimulus, a response and a reinforcing or punishing consequence, the antecedent stimulus can be expanded to innumerable amounts of other contingencies, called n-term contingencies, which each contain “contextual antecedent stimuli, each of which functions to alter the function of another stimulus, until we reach the stimulus that actually evokes the behavior.” (Ledoux, 2014, p.287). These so-called “function-altering stimuli” can alter “the function of another stimulus from the status of a neutral stimulus to an evocative stimulus.” So, let’s say we want to visit a friend on Labor Day. Because we have been drinking, a police car is suddenly no longer experienced by us as a neutral stimulus, but as a punitive stimulus. We stop our car in a side street and let someone, who didn’t drink drive and arrive safely at our friend’s house, without getting a DUI.

January 4, 2015

January 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writer is half way through reading the introductory Behaviorology-book “Running Out Of Time” (2014) by Stephen Ledoux. He highly recommends it, he learns a lot and he realizes there are many things he didn’t know. The natural science of human behavior is awesome.  Behaviorologist are behaviorists who established their science separate from the field of psychology. Behaviorology is not part of and no longer seeks recognition psychology. It is a science next to biology, physics and chemistry. This writer considers his views in line with behaviorology. 

Reading this book makes this writer realize that the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) path he has been travelling has brought about “enduring changes in the neural microstructures of his body”. Also, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and its punishing consequences have changed this author’s neural mediation, due to which the relationship has weakened between the occurrence of the evocative stimulus, Voice I and its response, NVB, which this evocative stimulus evokes. In other words, due to tacting, the verbal identification or naming of SVB and NVB, bodily changes have occured, which make the presence of the evocative stimulus called Voice I, induce more often the effective mediation of an avoidance response, due to which this author finds himself less and less exposed to, involved in or effected by NVB. Also, the SVB/NVB stimulus-evocation process has strengthened a bodily response to the evocative stimulus Voice II, which post-cedently leads to reinforcement.

SVB cannot and will not occur without listening to ourselves while we speak. “The reinforcing stimuli functionally feed energy back into the organism’s nervous system, changing it so that the now different nervous system mediates behavior differently.” (Ledoux, 2014). Evocative stimuli are also the Voice II-producing others in whose presence the evoked response, SVB, is reinforced. Mediation by others is as important as mediation by the speaker him or herself. Unless the mediation by self and others happen at the same time, SVB cannot be consequated. If they don’t happen together, the nervous system will be conditioned to prefer Voice I.   

Voice I and Voice II are evocative stimuli. SVB and NVB are two response classes. Either of these response classes are more likely to occur when they are reinforced. To increase SVB and decrease of NVB, it is of importance to understand the difference between when reinforcement of Voice II follows a SVB response and when no reinforcement follows the Voice II response. Only if reinforcement follows the Voice II response, will Voice II increase. The absence of reinforcement for Voice II makes SVB occur less often and eventually extinguishes this response. 

 

If SVB is not reinforced this doesn’t mean that therefore NVB is reinforced. Only in the presence of antecedent evocative stimulus Voice II, will SVB be reinforced and only in the presence of the antecedent evocative stimulus Voice I, will NVB be reinforced. Similarly to a pigeon, which can be trained that a green light signals occurrence of reinforcement, human beings can be trained that evocative stimulus Voice I signals punishment, while evocative stimulus Voice II signals reinforcement. 

Voice II may save one’s life in a threatening situation, while in a non-threatening situation, Voice I may be necessary to prevent getting involved into a conversation because one needs to go somewhere. There are various environmental reasons why it can be either reinforcing or punishing to speak with Voice I or Voice II and such consequences may vary from one moment to the next. One thing is for sure, if all SVB responses occur with reinforcement, SVB responses will be learned very rapidly and without any error, but if SVB responses are only sometimes are reinforced, or are not reinforced at all, then the SVB response will weaken and eventually extinguish. There is so very little SVB in the world because we are only just beginning to learn how to reinforce it. The errorless learning of SVB, which is effortless, requires an entirely different approach to learning. As long as people falsely believe that an inner agent causes them to talk the way they do, they misinterpret the physiological changes in their body and the will produce NVB.

January 3, 2015

January 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M. S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

What got this writer started explaining Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) was that others can produce a sound while they speak, which is more or less the same as his own sound. In behaviorology this principle is known as stimulus generalization. The more similar the new evocative stimulus, someone’s  voice, was to his own,  the more energized and inspired this writer became to produce and explore SVB. He knew very little, when he first began explaining to others that they too could produce Voice II, which produces SVB. Although his explanations were not as accurate as they are nowadays, even the smallest approximation made him happy. Since Voice II can only be produced when someone listens to him or herself, while he or she speaks, the person who produces Voice II is not imitating anyone’s voice, but he or she becomes, like a musician, attuned to his or her instrument, to his or her body. 

In a concert, musical instruments are also attuned to each other. That is why before the concert starts, musicians tune their instruments to the oboe, who plays what is known as the concert pitch, which is generally an A of 440 Herz. Interestingly, at various times in the history of classical music, musicians were inflating the pitch, because they were competing to produce brighter sounds. At some point this had to be stopped because strings were breaking and singers started having voice problems. 

In SVB, we are attuned to the pitch which is determined by our own sense of well-being. Like musicians, we must listen to our music, to our voice, to make sure that we sound right. If the musician wouldn’t listen to how he or she played, no music could be made. Similarly, if we don’t listen to how we talk, we can’t produce SVB. To the extent we are conditioned by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), we listen to others more than to ourselves. During NVB we don’t listen to ourselves at all. This is all very strange. Can you imagine musicians not listening to how they sound? 

Certainly, to have conversation with others, listening to others is necessary, but this should not result in excluding listening to ourselves.  This is exactly what happens in NVB: we listen to others or we want others to listen to us, but during NVB nobody is listening to him or herself. Our ears are conditioned in NVB not to listen to ourselves. Consequently, even when we try to listen to ourselves, we are so to speak tone-deaf to the frequency which involves our own sense of well-being. In NVB conversation, we produce sounds which never allow us to fully relax and be at ease with each other. Paradoxically, we fear listening to such sounds, because we were punished instead of reinforced when we were making these sounds. 

When he decided he wanted to spread SVB and dedicated his life to this goal, this author didn’t realize he would be continuously punished by the majority of people. However, as more people became attuned to him and to themselves, he felt more and more reinforced for his SVB and less and less for his NVB. This is what he promises to those who want SVB. It is not going to be easy, but it is absolutely worthwhile.  

This author witnesses that lesser and lesser responses are evoked in him by people with NVB and more and more responses are evoked in him by people with SVB. It is a continuous adjustment to the circumstances he is in. His recent loss of his job as a case manager liberated him from experiencing every day the intense frustration, stress, anger, fear, humiliation and despair of those who have been incarcerated. There was a big impact of this exposure and now that this impact is gone, it is clear that he was very much affected by it. It has been a good experience though, because it once again demonstrated that SVB works. Parolees and probationers fight back NVB, because they know they are being punished and humiliated.  They recognized that this author connected with them in SVB. This author feels grateful for experiencing their rawness, humor and comradery. It was a population he had not worked with before and it enriched his experience. Although it was sad to lose this job with benefits, this author is happy to go on with teaching psychology at Butte College.

January 2, 2015

January 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Readers, 

Currently the news is about an Indonesian airplane, which, on its way to Singapore, crashed in the ocean, killing all its passengers. We hear stories of people who were scheduled to be on this plane, but who, for some reason didn’t make it at the very last moment. They speak of ‘an act of God’ that they were saved from this tragedy. Others, whose family members died on the crash, still pray for a miracle, even though pieces of wreckage were found floating around in the ocean and the first corpses have been brought back home.  Some are waiting in vain at the airport, while praying at a make shift shrine. Others were throwing their hands in the air in disbelief and were asking the interviewer, why God was doing this? One man, whose aging grandmother was on the plane, regretted he didn’t visit her more often and cried that he would never see her again. The spot in the ocean where the plane had crashed, because of the bad weather, is hard to get to and the identified pieces of wreckage are spread out over many miles. Even under more positive circumstances it would be difficult to find the deceased and the black box, which may contain important information about the reasons why the plane had crashed. The way in which this calamity is broadcasted demonstrates how many of our superstitions are perpetuated. Many people live in two different worlds. On the one hand they all know that planes depart and arrive on certain time schedules. They rely on these remarkable pieces of modern technology, which are created by people who know science. Nothing about this plane or the loss of its passengers is explained by anyone's belief in God. In the face of this disaster it is quite apparent that the religious beliefs don’t explain anything. Sadly, if they can be salvaged, only the broken pieces can help us to piece together what happened. 

Out of sympathy for the diseased, news reporters play along and pray along with the survivors, but they don’t report anything about the real disaster that is going on. The real catastrophe is that modern people, although they make use of computers, cell phones, airplanes, satellites, medicine etc., continue to have beliefs which are pre-and anti-scientific. As long as we keep down-playing this tragic fact as long as we keep pretending that things are real, which are not real, but just make-belief, we cannot address any of the urgent global problems which mankind is facing. 

The only way out of this mess is changing the way we communicate. Our usual way of communicating perpetuates the tremendous damage we have been doing. Unless our usual way of communicating, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), is decreased, and,  extinguished, that is, completely stopped, NVB is going to counteract the good that has been done and that is done by Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). These two universal response classes, SVB and NVB, explain what is happening in human interaction. 

In behaviorism the lawfulness of how human beings interact is analyzed. Antecedent variables relate to the context in which the interaction occurs. This writer wants to focus the reader’s attention on one antecedent stimulus: the sound of the speaker's voice. Everyone has their own voice. In spoken communication all these different voices are different contextual stimuli, or independent variables, which all have a different effect on the behavioral response, the dependent variable, our interaction. And, one voice affects another, one stimulus affects the function of the next stimulus. 

Our behavior of concern, our interaction, is determined by whether our voices are  attuned. This has nothing to do with how we may individually try to sound. It is how we sound under the circumstances that we are in. If we can make a rocket go to the moon and come back safely, if we can replace someone’s heart, if we can have libraries within libraries at the tip of our fingers on our hand-held I-Phone, why do we still communicate in such a way that we create chaos and destruction? The results of our communication are unacceptable compared to an engineer who builds a bridge. The bridge that collapses is a failure of design. A heart surgeon whose patients die as a result of his operation is no good.  Who needs a mechanic who can’t fix our car? Why do we have leaders, who condone armies, bombings and killings? We have a different standard for how we communicate, because we are unscientific about it. 

In SVB as well as in NVB, each stimulus, each voice, alters the function of the next stimulus, another voice. Either we talk with each other as one voice, or we talk with one another as many voices. Either we talk about the reality as one reality or we talk about the reality we seek to enforce on each other. The difference between SVB and NVB is simple: we either sound good or we sound terrible. If we pay attention to how we influence each other, to how we are influenced by each other, to how our way of communicating is a function of environmental variables, we would notice that it all comes down to how we sound. In SVB we sound happy, at ease, pleasant, satisfied, safe, calm, positive, alive, melodious, sensitive, open, friendly and patient, but in NVB we sound harsh, negative, rigid, stressed, anxious, angered, irritated, restless, drained, flat, cold, unfriendly, agitated, worried, defensive, guarded and uneasy.   

What is known in behaviorism as stimulus control, deals with the tone of our voice, which antecedently controls our interaction.   During our life time, our bodies, our genetically produced neural structures, are conditioned by this inevitable process of stimulus-produced behavior mediation. When we begin to pay attention to how we sound while we speak, we find out, much to our surprise, that reality never really sounds that bad, but that our fabrications always sound horrible. 

After we have repeatedly verified the difference between Voice I and Voice II, the voice which produces NVB and the voice which produces SVB, we begin to take notice that if person A has NVB, then person B eventually begins to have NVB too, even if he or she was initially having SVB. However, if person A has SVB, it doesn’t mean that person B is going to have SVB. To the contrary, if person A has SVB, person B most likely will continue with NVB. Moreover, the SVB of person A will change into the NVB of person B. Only on rare occasions will the SVB of person A cause the SVB of person B, who was having NVB. The reason for this is that when for instance a person is afraid and someone tells him or her not to be afraid, this person is still likely to be afraid, unless this other person takes the fear away by making this person feel comfortable and safe. There is a big difference between making a person feel safe and telling a person he or she is safe. The person who was afraid likes to feel safe and would like to believe that others can make him or her feel safe, but whether or not this person is really going to feel safe, depends on whether what is offered by those who tell him or her not to be afraid really provide safety. Much of what is offered in how we communicate is based on the pretention and exploitation of safety. 

The assumption of safety has led to catastrophic consequences. It has closed our ears and eyes to what is happening and to how we cause the ugly noisy world we live in.   Stimulus generalization is the process in which individuals who were taught that they were safe, while in fact they weren’t, are more likely to listen to the voices of authority, of those, who like their parents, failed to protect them, but who nonetheless pretend to. These persons have the same tone and the same behaviors people are used to, which perpetuate the illusion of safety. This is known as response generalization. 

Most of us grew up with more NVB than with SVB. If we are not paying attention to the sound of our voice while we speak, we have no way of tracing back the runaway train of functional relations that led to NVB. The term generalization is useful as it  cuts through a lot of bullshit. All elements which pertain to the NVB response always appear together.  Discussion of these elements separately leads to hair-splitting, but analysis of the contingency that gives rise to NVB can reveal the evocative stimulus relations. NVB is a response class which always has similar consequences.  Results are achieved by means of coercion and there are many NVB ways in which to accomplish this. It is because of our NVB-maintained belief in behavior-causing agents, that we are distracted from the variables in our environment which maintain NVB. More specifically, our NVB is maintained by the sound which is produced by our body’s natural response to an unsafe environment. Only if our environment was safe could and would our body naturally produce a SVB sound. 

 

The antecedent stimuli, the voices of individuals, who produce the SVB response, are unique. While hierarchical consequences of the NVB response can only be accomplished in the same old forceful way, relationship-enhancing consequences of SVB are accomplished by many different voices, which are speaking as one.  When voices are attuned to each other, as they are in SVB, they gain strength and beauty, which they couldn’t attain alone. The illusion of this unifying process is achieved in NVB, by voices which either sound bombastic, monotonous or depressing. 

In SVB our different voices are validated, enhanced and celebrated, while in NVB any deviation from the norm is punished and rejected. Stimulus generalization, applies to both SVB and NVB. In SVB, it refers to how we all contribute to the same result, to creating better and more relationships, but in NVB, it refers to a different kind of result, to destroying, exploiting, undermining, sacrificing and disrespecting our relationships. In behavioral terms, the more the evocative stimulus, our voice, causes responding, the more similar the new evocative stimulus will be.