October 19, 2015

October 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

From today on I am going to directly address you. Since you are the one who is reading this, you are probably the one who is willing to listen to me. I have been directing much writing to people who most unlikely are not willing to listen to me. Why should I keep wasting my time? I turn to you and would like to talk with you. My way of talking is different than the talking you are familiar with. I guarantee you will agree with me. I teach Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). This is very different from the way of talking which you are used to: Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

It is liberating for me to write to you. I know you have also suffered and I am happy that we have found each other and we can acknowledge our suffering. Nobody comes to SVB without first acknowledging how much suffering was created by NVB. Those who are unwilling or unable to acknowledge the devastating effects of our presumably ‘normal’ way of communicating haven’t suffered enough to want SVB. It is because we can avoid this suffering that we long to have SVB. In other words, SVB is negatively reinforced as it teaches to avoid aversive stimulation. 

The difference between SVB and NVB is simple; in the former we really talk with each other, but in the latter we only pretend to talk with each other. In spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe that NVB is communication as we aren’t often enough in the situation in which we can calmly detect the great difference between SVB and NVB. Fact is, however, that we have all been in such situations. 

Although we experience a lot of negativity and stress, it is absolutely unavoidable that at some point we are relaxed and at ease again. Our inability to achieve this would be our decline and to the extent that we are unable to achieve this we are rapidly declining. However, we cannot pretend to be without negativity and stress. No matter how much we are capable of faking our comfort, our ‘comfort zones’ prevent us from really understanding what stops us from being peaceful and at ease. 

Analysis of how we talk with each other is the last thing on our agenda. Actually, it isn’t even on anyone’s agenda. No academic authority insists that we should have a different way of talking and that this will change everything. Those who have done so have failed. Their failure didn’t inspire anyone to explore what they apparently hadn’t yet explored. They failed as at some point their exploration stopped. People have tried to escape their communication problems, but they have yet to learn how to avoid them altogether. We dread the problems that we cannot solve. Enduring situations of inescapable aversive stimulation result in pathological behavior. 

Mankind’s biggest problem continues to be a communication problem. How are we ever going to overcome this if we keep on failing? SVB is the solution as it addresses this matter. In SVB the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. This way of talking is different from NVB, in which the speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself while he or she speaks. In most of our communication speakers don’t hear themselves speak and that is why I call most of our communication NVB. In NVB the speaker’s voice is a noxious stimulus to the listener as the NVB speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself. When we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak we begin to sound terrible. We can only recognize that we have SVB when our voices sound better again. We sound better when we are calm, happy, safe and conscious. 

During NVB there is stress, anxiety, distrust, fear and anger. The tone of the speaker’s voice induces negative affect in the listener in NVB, but in SVB it induces positive affect. You cannot do both at once, you either do one or the other. If you have SVB, you stop having NVB and if you have NVB, you stop having SVB. In other words, we can go back and forth between SVB and NVB very quickly, although we usually don’t. If we would go back and forth between SVB and NVB, we would be better capable of achieving and maintaining SVB, but since we don’t go back and forth that often, we remain most of the time stuck with our NVB. 

The switch between SVB and NVB is so dramatic that it can’t be missed. We can’t achieve, let alone maintain SVB without going back and forth and that is why we settle for NVB. Yet, we can all hear the difference between a SVB and a NVB speaker. Although we can hear and notice that the speaker induces negative feelings in us, we accept this as we can’t do anything about it. In NVB the speaker is hierarchically above the listener. The speaker may be our boss, teacher, preacher, wife, husband or anyone who is dominating us and is allowed to get away with it. Therefore, NVB is the communication which occurs between the oppressor and the oppressed, but both parties maintain it.  

In SVB there is no oppressor and there are no oppressed. Both SVB as well as NVB are maintained by the speaker and the listener. As most people have no understanding about behaviorism they continue to believe that they are causing their own behavior or that others are  causing their own behavior. This belief makes our interaction unreal. When we have SVB, we are aware that we are creating and maintaining it together, but when we are engaged in NVB, we believe some inner agent or self is causing it. It doesn’t matter whether this inner agent is in someone else or that we believe to be causing our own behavior.

October 18, 2015

October 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my third response to “What do Animals Mean?” (2009) by D. Randall, M. Owren & M. Ryan. The difference between human speech and the vocalizations of nonhuman primates can never really be made clear without the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). This distinction is biologically-based and is entire different from mentalistic constructs such as “exchange of semantic information”, “referential quality of human language”, “perspective taking” or “mental state attribution abilities.” When we compare “vocalizations of nonhuman primates to human speech” and take the SVB/NVB distinction in consideration, we find that we are not “fundamentally different.” Indeed, we are more similar than different.

The title of the paper was “What do Animals Mean?”, but this is usually interpreted as “What information do they convey?” The authors find this question, which, in animal research, is sometimes only implicitly asked, “ill-posed.” By being explicit about animal communication, they allow us to put our finger on something which is of great importance for humans. However, this will only become clear if we go one step further. Before we can say anything meaningful about nonhuman animal communication, we must clarify this question about human interaction: What do humans mean? Most of us think that we convey information to each other, but, each time we speak, we influence each other, like primates do, with the tone of our voice. Obviously, this is true, yet we have remained oblivious about this biological process as long as we kept thinking in terms of receiving, encoding and retrieving information. Not only have we been “casting animal communication systems in linguistic and informational terms”, we have been thinking and talking about our interactions with each other as if vocalizations have no meaning without language.

Before we can answer the question “What do Animals Mean?”, we must answer the question: what do humans mean? To answer this question without getting stuck in imaginary constructs, which didn’t and which couldn’t tell us anything useful about human interaction, we must pay attention to how we sound. This changes the question into: how does the sound produced by the speaker, regardless of the words that he or she uses, affect the nervous system of listener? This makes us aware that the sound of the speaker always influences the listener in one of two ways: it induces positive affect, a sense of safety and it will therefore elicit approach behavior or it will induce negative affect, a sense of threat and therefore it will elicit escape or avoidance behavior. The former sets the stage for SVB and the latter sets the stage for NVB. 

The authors conclude their paper with the statement “Although the loosely defined linguistic and informational constructs make convenient explanatory shorthand, they are problematic when elevated beyond metaphor and pressed into service as substantive explanation for the broad sweep of animal-signalling phenomena (Owren & Rendall 2001).” These “linguistic and informational constructs” haven’t allowed us to better understand human interaction either. “Metaphors” have made things worse as they didn’t and couldn’t bring us closer to our biology, to how we sound and most importantly to how the listener is affected by the speaker’s voice. We should be grateful to these researchers, who make us pay attention to “animal-signaling phenomena.”

If other researchers are going to follow their lead, they will have to change their way of talking about primates. This change in their way of talking involves the shift from NVB to SVB as only during SVB does the speaker pay attention to how his or her voice is perceived by the listener. Only in SVB can the speaker respond to the feedback he or she receives from the listener and adjust his or her voice so that the listener will not be aversively stimulated. In other words, due to the SVB/NVB distinction, at long last, we are becoming conscious of the importance of human-signalling phenomena.

When we compare human and animal signaling phenomena this will tremendously benefit our interaction. We will no longer be trapped by metaphorical constructs such as “information as a communicative commodity to be transferred, shared or exchanged.” Moreover, we will no longer overlook “important factors that shape functional signal design in different species”, our own species included. Also, we will engage in accurate, pragmatic “ethological inquiry and explanation.” By replacing “the traditional emphasis on information with an emphasis on influence that stays closer to basic evolutionary principles in ascribing signalers and perceivers distinct roles and potentially divergent interests in communication processes (Dawkins & Krebs 1978),” we will realize that the “divergent interests in communication processes” are always related to dominance hierarchies, which played a role in our evolutionary history, but which in our current environment threatens our survival. Stated differently, we understand that NVB is a behavioral vestige, which prevents progress of human relationship. “The corollary is that we must also accept that signaling phenomena will often entail asymmetries not generally observed or modelled in formal systems like language. These will include asymmetries in the mechanisms that support signal production in senders versus reception in perceivers, and functional asymmetries that leave signalers and perceivers at different points in the evolutionary dynamic. With this emphasis, the details of signal design are not arbitrary, or somehow secondary to the process of communicating, as they are thought to be in language, but rather they are absolutely central to it.”

In SVB we come out of the dark ages and dissolve “asymmetries in the mechanisms that support signal production in senders versus reception in perceivers.” Acknowledging the work of these animal researchers will make us more scientific about human interaction as we embrace the continuity of behavior in different species. I agree with these authors, who state that “animal signalling is likely to be key to working out the evolution of human communication behavior as well.” We will not “bias our discovery of ‘potential’ communalities” between primates and humans once we discriminate and talk about the SVB/NVB distinction.

October 17, 2015

October 17, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is a second response to “What do Animals Mean?” (2009) by D. Randall, M. Owren & M. Ryan. The ‘picture’ described in yesterday’s writing needs to be slightly altered so that Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) becomes visible. The monkeys must be humans. Also they must be senders as well as receivers. Verbal behavior flows in both directions and has to be depicted by two arrows. The simultaneous, bi-directional, co-regulating effect of their nonverbal and verbal behavior can be depicted by another set of arrows. In other words, there must be four arrows, describing a feedback-mechanism in which verbal expressions will accurately describe our nonverbal experiences. In addition, the listener lets the speaker know how he or she is experiencing him or her, which stimulates the speaker to adjust his or her vocal expression to the listener. This fine-tuning of the speaker’s speaking behavior with the listener’s listening behavior, which requires turn-taking between speaker and listener, is made possible due to the absence of aversive stimulation. Stated differently, the informational approach should be abandoned as its uni-directionality, our most problematic language habit, always makes us de-contextualize ourselves and each other.

“Although informational approaches have tremendous intuitive appeal, they are at one and the same time both too loose and too restrictive to cover the broad range of animal-signaling phenomena.” These authors, who are not familiar with the SVB/Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction, don’t realize that their writing is never going result into the discovery and exploration of “the fundamental properties of signal phenomena.” Like adherents of “informational approaches”, they too“often overlook, obscure or underspecify many of the fundamental properties of signal phenomena” as they don’t know how to link animal vocalizations to human vocalizations.

These animal researchers give many reasons why humans should reject “information approaches,” but they leave out the most important one, namely that humans are affected by each other’s sound in exactly the same way as primates. This common “view of language-like meaning and communication has also been used to organize studies of primates and some other taxa because our own experience with language makes it a natural metaphor for studying communication in other species.” Since words presumably ‘represent’ something for us humans, monkey signals are now also falsely believed to represent something for them.

It was believed to represent information of the human kind as “some vocalizations were found to be produced in specific contexts, such as when encountering predators or food, and listeners responded to such vocalizations in equally specific and appropriate ways as if semantic information had been exchanged” (Seyfarth et al. 1980). Nonetheless, human communication never merely was only an exchange of semantic information, but, in SVB, is a reciprocal, empathic response to how we sound. “Exchange of semantic information” by itself signifies NVB, the absence of co-regulation and a dis-regulating infatuation with words.

These researchers noted that “representational modes of signaling have been reported in only a few species, and then only in a small fraction of the vocal repertoire.” Interestingly, they found a difference between callers/speakers and responders/listeners. “Thus, although listeners sometimes respond to vocalizations ‘as if’ they contained semantic information, callers prove to be fundamentally unaware of the informational value of their own signals.” This speaker’s fact is quite similar to how most human so-called ‘interaction’ actually works. For the most part human speakers are “fundamentally unaware of the informational value of their own signals” and therefore engage in NVB. In other words, for the most part, they are unaware of how they sound.

Only in SVB do the speakers recognize how the effect the listener, but in NVB the aversive impact of the speaker on the listener is automatic.

Also non-behaviorist researchers interpret the recent findings as “an informational disconnect between signalers and receivers” and suggest “they do not share the same representational parity that characterizes human speech (Cheney & Seyfarth 1996, 1998, 2005).” Behaviorists as well as non-behaviorists are unaware about the SVB/NVB distinction. 

The reader is asked to read through the fog that is created by language. When the word ‘information’ is used it is best to think of what matters most in the animal world: safety or threat. In the former, the calling animal communicates a form of SVB, but in the latter, the speaker communicates NVB to the listener. Those who threaten others are never considerate about their effect on those who they prey upon. “In fact, the failure of calling animals to take account of the informational needs of listeners corroborates a growing literature showing that nonhuman primates show little of the perspective taking and mental state attribution abilities considered to be foundational to the referential quality of human language (reviewed in Penn & Povinelli 2007).” What is referred to in this statement as “perspective taking” only comes into play with SVB, but is completely absent in NVB.

Since most of our interaction can be categorized as NVB, we are very much like primates. The few moments that we are able to attain SVB have nothing to do with “the referential quality of human language” or with “mental state attribution abilities”, but with the speaker’s precise verbal description of how he or she is affecting the listener. Accuracy of this description requires activation of the speaker-as-own-listener; only when the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks, can he or she be aware how others are experiencing him or her. Thus, by listening to him or herself, the speaker and the listener become one.

It is unclear what the authors mean with “language production” as this  can mean SVB or NVB. “Language production in humans also involves a variety of subcortical circuits but relies importantly on volitionally controlled processes in temporal- and frontal-lobe cortical regions (Lieberman, 2002).” I claim only NVB “involves a variety of subcortical circuits” and am convinced only SVB “relies importantly on volitionally controlled processes in temporal- and frontal-lobe cortical regions.” It has to be this way as in NVB the speaker threatens the listener, which activates the more ancient parts of our brains. During SVB, on the other hand, the speaker never aversively influences the listener.

October 16, 2015

October 16, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This writing is a first response to “What do Animals Mean?” (2009) by D. Randall, M. Owren & M. Ryan. I use the evidence gathered by these animal researchers to point out the biological origins of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). It doesn’t come as a surprise that “animal communication studies” are as much troubled by metaphoric “constructs such as information encoding and transfer”, (which don’t map onto the biological world), as human communication studies. The term ‘anthropomorphism’ has neither prevented us from anthropomorphizing nor has it enhanced our understanding of the situation in which we are inclined to get carried away by our verbiage.

The SVB/NVB distinction, however, is aligned with these researchers, who “focus instead on concrete details of signal design as they reflect and interact with established sensory, physiological and psychological processes that support signalling and responding in listeners.” Only of SVB we can say that the speaker supports “signaling and responding in listeners”, that is, only the SVB speaker evokes the listener to become a SVB speaker as well. The NVB speaker doesn’t “support signaling and responding in the listeners.” Moreover, the NVB speaker prevents the listener from speaking or will condition him or her to speak in a NVB manner. These authors explain aspects of SVB and NVB because “the alternatives we advocate also explicitly acknowledge the different roles and often divergent interests of signallers and perceivers that can yield fundamental asymmetries in signalling interactions, and they therefore shift the focus of interpretations of animal communication from informing others to influencing others.” It is of crucial importance for  our understanding of human communication that we “shift the focus” from “informing others to influencing others” as this is what we as human do every day. The SVB/NVB distinction will facilitate this shift.  

The information-processing paradigm, which dominates both animal research and human communication research, uses metaphors to obfuscate the fact that humans, like primates, influence each other with their sound. For example, “Dall et al. (2005, page 192) recently observed that ‘evolutionary and behavioural ecologists do not adopt consistent, rigorous concepts of information… [instead] informal use of the term information is the norm’. Dall et al. go on to consider how such traditionally loose and informal concepts of information are now inadequate for many of the emerging problems in behavioural ecology.” Unless we adopt the SVB/NVB distinction, that is, unless we adopt a standard for our human nonverbal interaction, we will keep on beating (nonverbally) around the (verbal) metaphoric bush.

As we think our communication problems are verbal, we continue to believe that “consistent, rigorous concepts of information” will be the solution. The SVB/NVB distinction shows that our communication problems are nonverbal and can only be solved if we pay attention to how we sound while we speak. The authors don’t object to the fact that they remain verbally preoccupied. Their “arguments are prompted by the same problem because research in animal communication similarly suffers from the lack of clear and rigorous definitions of information, yet none the less affords the construct a central explanatory role.”

Instead of grooming they are just splitting hairs; the latter is NVB, the former is SVB. It is irrelevant whether “Hauser (1996, page 6) defined signals as ‘[carrying] informational content, which can be manipulated by the sender and differentially acted on by the perceiver’”, or whether “Bradbury& Vehrencamp (1998, page 2) characterized communication as ‘provision of information from a sender to a receiver’, going on (page 3) to say that ‘true communication’ is ‘information exchange’ from which both sender and receiver benefit.” All of this is based on verbal fixation, which characterizes NVB. In SVB there is a connection between what we say and how we say it. Authors who know about SVB will not over-emphasize the verbal and only pay lip-service to the nonverbal.

The use of “informational and linguistic constructs in animal research” was never really the problem. The problem is always the exclusion of the nonverbal, the environment with which the verbal human interacts. This sets the stage for NVB. However, like most scientists, these authors seem to think it is merely a matter of developing more well-defined constructs. They write that “Grounding the idea of communication in undefined informational constructs renders both those constructs and others that flow from them untenable.” Of course, they have a point, but they miss the more important point: how humans talk with each other will determine how they will think about animal communication.

When it comes to human interaction there is simply no such a thing as as a verbal “quantifiable information construct” by itself. Regardless of what is said or read, our verbal behavior is always accompanied by our nonverbal behavior. We again and again make the big mistake that our verbal behavior can be considered by itself and by doing so we engage in NVB. By acknowledging that our verbal and our nonverbal behavior cannot be separated from each other, we will engage in SVB, which is characterized by alignment of our verbal and nonverbal expressions.

The authors drew a great picture of two monkeys sitting opposed from each other. One is the “signaler” and the other the “receiver.” A cloud above the first monkey (the signaler) contains “reprerepresentational… ideation…generate message…encode…transmit”, while the cloud above the other monkey (the receiver) contains “retrieve representation…

recover message…decode…receive.” Between the monkeys is a cylinder with the word “information” on it and an arrow going from the sender to the receiver. This simplistic drawing of uni-directional interaction is a visual image of NVB. In SVB, in which the speaker is also the listener and the listener is also the speaker, there is always bi-directional interaction. This picture might as well be about human beings. The authors wrote “The burden of communication falls squarely on the disembodied ‘packet of information’ encoded in the signal flowing from signaller to receiver.” That they wrote this demonstrates ignorance about SVB, which deals with both the verbal as well as the nonverbal.