October
3, 2015
Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S.
Verbal Engineer
Dear Reader,
This
writing is my seventh response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers
Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). The following statement characterizes the author’s
bias toward visual stimuli. “At the behavioral level, the neural activity underlying
the response is invisible to the reinforcing environment.”
Like other behaviorists, they have been ‘looking’ for variables in the
environment. However, observable variables don’t stimulate them to ‘look’ for
the auditory variables that might be involved. When it comes to auditory variables there is nothing to ‘look’ for. They
are easier to detect when one closes one’s eyes. While temporarily depriving oneself
from visual stimuli, one is bound to become more alert to auditory stimuli.
There is nothing new about this ancient practice, which ‘sheds
light’ onto private-speech-receded public speech, that is, to what one is
saying to one self. Many so-called meditators have attempted in vain to
‘observe’ what they were thinking or feeling, but for them too, it was visual bias which prevented them from
listening to and tracing back the environmental
variables that are in the maintenance of these covert phenomena. Before this
writer became a behaviorist, he was intensely involved in such ‘meditative’
activities. He became frustrated with his attempts to achieve silence by trying
to ‘observe’ what he at that time still believed to be his ‘mind.’ Because of growing
up in a family with six children in which there was a lot of talking and
screaming and because he had been studying classical music for many years as a
tenor-singer, he had been strongly attracted to singing and speaking. The
latter had often gotten him in a lot of trouble.
Not many meditators are interested in talking about
meditation. The so-called meditation always seemed to be over as soon as the
talking began again. I could not keep my mouth shut because I was convinced it
should be possible to talk meditatively. Since no one was interested in
exploring this possibility with me, I began to talk out loud by myself. As I felt
rejected and hurt I discovered SVB by listening to my sound while I speak. Most
behaviorists, like these superstitious meditators, believe that they have found
the Holy Grail: observable environmental stimuli which cause the response. Similarly
to these spiritualists, most behaviorists (even Skinner himself) are not exploring
auditory stimuli which are causing their own verbal behavior as they were conditioned
to pay attention to visual stimuli. Consequently, in day-to-day speech, they
are more focused on what they say then on how they are saying it.
To pay close attention to how we sound while we speak
requires a focus on our own voice. This focus can only be made if what we are
saying is no longer ‘dominating’ how we are saying it. The situation in which
we are stimulated to listen to ourselves while we speak has to be one in which
we don’t have to be overly careful about what we are saying. Stated
differently, only when we are feeling safe, accepted, acknowledged, supported
and positively reinforced, only in the absence of aversive stimulation, will we
be speakers who are not coercing, exploiting, manipulating, draining,
distracting and dysregulating the listener. What we are saying also becomes coherent in SVB; how we are saying it makes this happen. Another way of
putting this is in SVB nonverbal and verbal expressions are aligned as the
speaker experiences him or herself as the listener. The speaker’s nonverbal
auditory stimuli, his or her voice, control his or her verbal behavior.
Although, like neural stimuli, auditory stimuli are
invisible, they can be listened to. Moreover, listening to auditory stimuli is
not as complicated as observing neural stimuli; it doesn’t involve any other
measurement instruments than our ears. As a matter of fact, listening to ourselves
is the easiest thing to do. It is effortless and without any tension. We have
all done it if circumstances permitted it and we are all familiar with it. At
the level of our vocal verbal behavior we have all spoken at one time with a
voice which was reinforcing to us.
The big deal about ‘finding our own voice’
is in direct proportion to the extent that we were prevented that from having
it. Everything that stressed, threatened, forced, angered and frustrated us has
prevented us from producing what we would happily call ‘our true sound’. In
other words, our ‘real voice’ always expresses our relaxation and well-being.
When we talk with that voice in SVB we are conscious that we are using that
voice.
When we have NVB, on the other hand, we don’t know that our
voice is an aversive stimulus that induces negative affect in the listener, who
is also the speaker him or herself. However, the listener knows and if the
speaker becomes the listener of his or her own voice while he or she speaks,
he or she will know this too and experience SVB.
Indeed, when NVB stops, SVB
begins and when SVB stops NVB begins. These two ways of talking are mutually
exclusive and diametrically opposed to each other. In SVB the speaker is
conscious of his or her speech as the focus
on his or her sound, which is produced and listened to here/now, will make and
keep the speaker conscious. In NVB, however, the speaker is mechanical and
unconscious as he or she doesn’t listen to his or her sound while he or she
speaks. The NVB speaker only becomes conscious of him or herself again during
SVB, when he or she finds that he or she was ‘on automatic pilot’ and not listening
to him or herself.