November 16, 2015

November 16, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Student, 

This writing is a third response to the paper “Seeing with ears: Sightless human’s perception of dog bark provides a test for structural rules in vocal communication” (2009) by C.Molnar, P.Pongracz and A. Miklosi. It is unfortunately nothing unusual that these authors still misrepresent Owren and Rendall (1997), who have written so many papers and presumably have said so much about the Affect-Inducing properties of primate vocalizations. This proves my point that the only thing academics really do is write to each other and respond to each other’s writings. Only by writing can such misrepresentations be perpetuated. 

We avoid spoken communication in order to be able to maintain our convictions. Many misunderstandings and misrepresentations are the effect of the absence of interaction. Academics merely pretend to be having a conversation. All they care about is to proclaim their theories. If they have any conversation at all, they are predetermining what they are going to say. I call such prefabricated communication Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). It is noxious as they speak with a sound, a tone, which is perceived as an aversive stimulus by the listener. In NVB the speaker induces negative affect in the listener. This self-serving bias prevents real interaction. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the speaker’s voice is perceived by the listener as an appetitive stimulus. In SVB the speaker induces positive emotions in the listener. The agreement that is achieved in SVB is qualitatively different from the so-called agreement which is coerced in NVB.

We have yet to decipher that NVB is about domination, hierarchy, intimidation, aggression, misrepresentation, fabrication and dissociation and that SVB is the spoken communication in which we are without such aversive stimulation. Yes, my dear reader, this war of words, this war of ideas, isn’t even fought in the debates, it rages on, sanitized from emotions, in peer-reviewed journals and in the texts that are written for the politicians by the speech writers. Our rates of SVB are at such an all-time low as everyone believes that the printed word is more important than the spoken word. This widespread belief is perhaps even more devastating than any religious belief. Most likely people hang on to their beliefs as they actually do want to talk.

I believe in SVB as I would like to talk. People believe in God as they too want to be able to talk. I have never thought this thought before. God, Allah or whatever we believe this so-called higher power to be, doesn’t and can’t fulfill our ‘need’ for interaction. Only other human beings can do that. This is why we are ‘identified’ with religious and political view; we want to belong and can only achieve a sense of belonging by being with people who talk like us. That sums up ideological differences. Although I believe in SVB, SVB is not a belief; NVB is a belief. 

My only interest in reading academic papers is the literature review and the discussion, the parts which at least have some semblance of a dialogue. Let me now return to the paper which I am currently reviewing. These hard-headed authors write “If humans can successfully recognize vocal signals of another species independently of the previous experiences, it would support Morton’s (1977) theory.” Why didn’t they conclude that “If humans can successfully recognize vocal signals of another species independently of the previous experiences” it would support Owren and Rendall’s (1997) theory of Affect-Induction?? They don’t have any history with any behavioral theory and their talking partners are from the Information-Processing religion. 

We all need people to talk with. That is why the abused usually keep talking with their abusers. The world of academia is very abusive and hostile and the only way to be successful is to take the abuse and to pretend as if all this NVB is okay. It only now becomes clear to me why the academic environment I was involved in didn’t and couldn’t produce nor acknowledge my distinction between SVB and NVB. This distinction could only be made in a stable and peaceful environment. Everyone who is part of this punitive and competitive process of publishing a paper, knows that they must stay with their group of believers. “However, if humans with less experience had more difficulties in this task, that would show the importance of the referential/affect-condi-tioning paradigm.” As these authors don’t understand Owren and Rendall’s “Affect-Conditioning Model” they hypothesize about the “referential/affect-conditioning paradigm.” It may not seem anything to you, dear reader, but “referential” indicates they misappropriate Owren and Rendall’s behaviorist interpretation.

This happens all the time; many behavioristic explanations have been stolen or reformulated by those who in a sense want to have it both ways. Although we live in world that is sustained by science and technology, people still hang on to their outdated beliefs. However, my distinction between SVB and NVB cannot be misused, as it exposes and weeds out these contradictions. 

Only someone who knows the difference between SVB and NVB can  analyze the false praise these authors have for Owren and Rendall. “Although it is much easier to evaluate the answers of humans than to record and decipher the reactions of animals by applying questionnaires, until now only a handful of experiments have been performed that have tested human participants in categorizing animal sounds.” Presumably they are so impressed that they mention them a second time: “It was found that humans can differentiate among individual macaques by their calls (Owren & Rendall, 2003), but participants mostly failed in categorizing cat meows by context (Nicastro & Owren, 2003). Their allegiance is not to Owren and Rendall’s functional account, but to “Morton’s (1977) Structural-Motivational Rules.”

“According to the “motivational–structural rules” hypothesis, atonal, low-pitched signals convey aggressive “meaning”, while tonal and high-pitched signals express sub-ordinance or the lack of aggressiveness.” Consequently, it is falsely “assumed also that there is no need for any prior learning in the receiver to perform the adequate response to the signal (Morton, 1977). In the discussion section of their paper the authors are a little more upfront about their disagreement with Owren and Rendall’s Affect-Conditioning Model. “According to the affect-conditioning model, the responses of receivers can be unconditioned, when the response is being produced by the signal itself, or conditioned, when response is influenced by past social interactions between the communicating partners.” They mention their model, but not their names, but when they mention “the motivational–structural rules hypothesis”, Morton’s name appears twice. The authors believe in “motivational states”, but such a mentalist construct is incompatible with “a conditioned or unconditioned response”. 

The findings of these authors are a mixture of apples and oranges, which “suggest that either (a) the ability of humans to describe dogs’ motivational state by hearing their barks is mostly not a learned, conditioned response” or “(b) this ability for recognition of barks can develop through sporadic access to nonvisual sources of information about emotional encoding of dog barking.” Words like “recognition”, “information” and “emotional encoding” have no place in a parsimonious behaviorist account.

In the last sentences of their paper, the authors mention that dog barks “are more variable in their pitch and harshness” than the barks of wolves. Wolves barks “are mainly low-pitch a-tonal sounds” and “dogs’ barking repertoire might have happened as a consequence of indirect selection through humans’ perceptual and cognitive capacities.” In SVB humans acquire more behavioral variability, but in NVB there is nothing that stimulates it.

Today also happens to be my 57^th birthday. It is early in the morning and I just got up. I dreamed about being part of a group of travelers, who arrived by bus in the middle of nowhere. Upon exiting the bus, a bunch of men came to us, who didn’t speak our language. They talked very fast and indicated they would take us into their cars and started loading up our bags. Everyone was overwhelmed and I was the only one who said no and hung on to my suitcase. They left me, but the others were goaded into their cars and driving away. It seemed clear to me that these people could not be trusted and were going to steal our belongings. 

This dream depicts how I feel about my distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In our conversations, we arrive, as a verbal community, as a culture, in the middle of nowhere, in an unknown territory. I realize that everyone is overwhelmed by coercive people. I am the only one who sees them for what they are. This is what happens again and again: we are overwhelmed by NVB. We surrender everything we have to those who take advantage of us. In SVB we are able to remain calm and notice what is happening. Thus, SVB is left untouched and those who were overwhelmed ended up being taken away by the NVB robbers. The journey of our conversation is not a new thing. I have travelled and have been in that situation before. I explored the conversation to the point where I was left by everyone and I was alone in the middle of nowhere.

I survived as SVB guides my life. Moreover, I married Bonnie, my loving wife. It was because of her I found SVB. Without SVB, we couldn’t have been married so happily and so long: thirty years. She stimulated me to have SVB and I am grateful she continues to do this even today. The dream from last night refers to events which took place before I met her. I am no longer left alone, but the experience has enriched me and I feel fortunate to have had it. The experience of aloneness is essential to increasing SVB. In NVB we are constantly overwhelmed by each other and the only way to prevent that is by moving and by staying away from aversive stimuli. The loneliness that was felt when everyone was leaving me was a blessing in disguise. It helped me to talk with myself and to listen to myself and to be by myself. In SVB the attraction to others declines as you realize most conversations end like that dream. Also, this need to go on this journey to nowhere has completely dissipated and I am not getting on such a bus-tour anymore. This is not a decision I make, but a natural outcome of my previous circumstances. It no longer overwhelms me when others are leaving; I continue with SVB.

November 15, 2015

November 15, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Student, 

This is a second response to the paper “Seeing with ears: Sightless human’s perception of dog bark provides a test for structural rules in vocal communication” (2009) by C.Molnar, P.Pongracz and A. Miklosi. Before I will further comment on this paper, I first want to tell you about the wonderful day I had yesterday with my wife Bonnie. We had our thirty year marriage anniversary. In the morning, we went for a nice walk in the park. Then we went shopping and bought two honeysuckle plants, which I planted in our garden. It was a day filled with joy and peace. I had a wonderful skype conversation with Arturo, my behaviorist friend from Colombia. It was so nice to share our happiness with him. After a lovely lunch and some wine I took a blissful nap, while Bonnie was watching her favorite show on TV.

In the evening, I was interviewed by Sue Hilderbrand. She has her own talk-show called “The Real Issue” at KZFR, the local radio station. The interview went very well and my message of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) had a big impact on her and on many others. Ben, a friend of Sue, also joined the conversation and was explaining in his own words what I was talking about. Jake, an environmentalist, who was to be interviewed after me, also said many validating things about our need for SVB. Sue, who is involved in local politics, said that she would definitely have me in her show again. Bonnie was reading a book in bed when I came home. It was cozy to join her. I also read a little, but soon I was overcome by sleep. I slept well and long and had a beautiful dream about the history of my knowledge. I was feeling so grateful that I almost started to cry, but I didn’t. I slept much longer than usual as I was having these positive emotions. 

My body feels rested and my thoughts about the distinction between SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are clear. To my knowledge nobody has analyzed spoken communication in the way I do. There are immense implications of my analysis. Sue, who interviewed me, brought up the issue of fear for being open. I said that our fear is not for SVB, but for NVB or rather, our fear signifies the absence of SVB. She agreed. We talked about how SVB public speech causes SVB private speech and how such SVB private speech allows us to recognize, avoid and ultimately prevent NVB public speech. Jake, the environmentalist, believed  it is because of NVB that our environment is in decline and Ben said we must learn to talk about difficult issues with SVB.

In spite of the fact that humans have language, our spoken communication is very much like that of animals. “Perhaps the best known examples can be found among alarm calls, which refer to different types of predators of a given species and elicit type-specific avoidance behavior(Diana monkeys, Cercopithecus diana , Zuberbuhler, Noe, & Seyfarth, 1997; suricata, Suricata suricatta , Manser, Seyfarth, & Cheney, 2002; prairie dog, Cynomys spp., Slobodchikoff, Fischer, & Shapiro, 1986; chicken, Gallus gallus, Evans, Evans, & Marler, 1993).” Like monkeys, we too produce “alarm calls”, that is, we produce NVB; like prairie dogs, we too produce NVB sounds “which refer to different types of predators”; and, like chickens, our sound too changes when we are threatened by predators, who produce NVB. NVB is produced by those who threaten as well as those who are threatened. NVB is the language of threat, fear, intimidation and aggression. SVB, on the other hand, is the language of affiliation, sociality and peace. Unfortunately, “These calls are” mistakenly “considered as functionally referential.” Animal researchers anthropomorphize by thinking that humans are different from animals as they have language. Although we have language, we are, biologically speaking, more similar than different than animals. 

As we misunderstand our verbal behavior, as we believe to be causing it, we explain animal behavior in terms of reference too. Presumably something inside of the animal, the “caller’s inner state”, causes it to call. Consequently, ethologists wrongly continue to “emphasize animal communication is more than simply sending signals about the caller’s inner state: Showing the proper behavioral response to a referential signal also requires learning from the receivers.” Let’s leave out “a referential signal” as it doesn’t explain anything. “The proper behavioral response” only “requires learning” or conditioning due to environmental stimuli, in other words, behavior is selected by consequences. Another way of describing the process, in which the caller, the speaker, learns from the receiver, the listener, is by emphasizing the two can’t exist separate from each other. 

The caller doesn’t only learn from the receiver, but the receiver also learns from the caller. Calling and receiving are bi-directional rather than uni-directional phenomena. These authors misrepresent the research by Owren and Rendall (1997), which points out that this whole information processing business is wrong. The organism-environment relationship is sufficient for explaining behavior. Their ““affect-conditioning” model for nonhuman primate (and many other animal) vocalizations”, also accounts for human vocalizations and doesn’t involve a self.  

“The most effective signals are” NOT “those that directly affect the receivers’ inner state”, and consequently the behavior, but those that directly change “their behavior.” This phenomenon can be experienced when our interaction changes from SVB to NVB. If we pay attention to how we sound while we speak, we immediately notice that as soon as a threat occurs this changes the sound of our voice. We are used to talking about feelings as inner states and that is why we are so bad at expressing emotions. As long as we continue to think emotions represent some imaginary inner state, we have an inaccurate account of how we are immediately affected by our environment, that is, by each other. There is a distinction between contingency-governed and rule-governed behavior. Due to language we overestimate the importance of rule-governed behavior, behavior that is function of verbal instruction, and underestimate the importance of contingency-governed behavior, behavior that is a function of other people.

Not surprisingly, these researchers don’t go into Owren’s & Rendall’s (1997) “Affect-Conditioning Model.” They mention it only in passing, but they don’t and can’t acknowledge the importance of this model for human interaction. Similar to primates, during human interaction “responses of receivers can be unconditioned, when the response is being produced by the signal itself, and conditioned, when the receiver’s response is a result of past social interactions between them—that is, where the caller elicited affective responses in the receiver through other means." They mention here the difference that behaviorist make between contingency-shaped versus rule-governed behavior. However, they completely misrepresent the “Affect Conditioning Model” by using it to validate research which was debunked by Owren and Rendall. The whole issue of “referentiality” is bogus.

Nothing can stop these authors from writing “This latter approach [Affect Induction Model], especially in nonhuman animal species, is not far from the definition of functional referentiality and gives further support for those opinions, which argue beside the dual (affective/referential) nature of many of the animal signal” (e.g.,Seyfarth& Cheney, 2003). Owren and Rendall wouldn’t give any support to this definition of “functional referentiality,” which is based on the debunked “Information Processing Model”. This is a classic example of what is described in entry-level psychology books as confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities”. They hang on to their NVB of the “referential/affect-conditioning paradigm.”

November 14, 2015

November 14, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Student, 

This is a response to “Seeing with ears: Sightless human’s perception of dog bark provides a test for structural rules in vocal communication” (2009) by Molnar, Pongracz and Miklosi. Researchers “played prerecorded family dog barks to groups of congenitally sightless, sightless with prior visual experience and sighted people (none of whom had owned a dog)”. They found  “blind people without any previous canine visual experiences can categorize accurately various dog barks recorded in different contexts, and their results are very close to those of sighted people in characterizing the emotional content of barks.”

These research findings confirm the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)/Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction, as they “suggest that humans can recognize some of the most important motivational states reflecting, for example, fear or aggression in a dog’s bark without any visual experience.” There is no doubt that these findings “can be generalized to other mammalian species—that is, no visual experience of another individual is needed for recognizing some of the most important motivational states of the caller.” This research corroborates the biological basis for SVB and NVB.

“Several studies have reported more efficient perceptual  processing (e.g., shorter reaction times)in blind than in sighted people, both in auditory and in tactile discrimination tasks” (Kujala, Lehtokoski, Alho, Kekoni, & Naatanen, 1997; Roder, Rosler, Hennighausen, & Nacker, 1996). Naturally, blind people focus on hearing since they can’t see. Moreover, “Neurophysiological recordings have revealed similar neural changes in the blind to those observed in populations with a specific history of perceptual experience (e.g., musicians).”

My history of singing and listening preceded my discovery of the SVB/NVB distinction. My interest in written words for a long time was much lower than my interest in spoken words. And, I was only interested in spoken words if the speaker, according to me, sounded good. I was and I still am less preoccupied with visual stimuli as I was and am more open to auditory stimuli. These neurophysiological data tell me that I must have similar neural activity as the people who are blind. However, I am not blind.  I have that similarity to blind people when we talk. Why? I listen! “Both musicians (Pantev et al., 1998) and blind adults (Roder, Rosler, & Neville, 1999) show an enhanced excitability of neural systems important for auditory processing.” And, “Since blind people rely more heavily on auditory information, it has been argued that they should show superior memory for input delivered through this modality.” I don’t care very much about taking pictures or showing pictures of myself to others.  

This research gets very interesting as “Cobb and colleagues (Cobb, Lawrence,& Nelson, 1979) did not find any differences in long-term memory for environmental sounds, nor for common tactile objects, between sighted and blind adults.” These long-term effects can only become apparent when we ‘look’ for them. Only under certain circumstances is the listener turned off or turned on by the sound of the speaker. Stated differently, in NVB speakers induce negative affect, but in SVB speakers induce positive affect in the listener. However, these ethologist researchers are not behaviorists and, consequently, they write about people possessing “different memory strategies” instead of referring to selection of behavior by environmental variables. 

When “Contrary to sighted pupils, blind participants recalled words better if they heard them than if they generated them themselves” this was “attributed to” (presumably: caused by) “an impaired or less well elaborated semantic network, which was assumed to be a consequence of the lack of visual input in the blind.” Although we can go deeper and deeper into the metaphoric rabbit hole, no behavior is explained this way and we are left with imaginary constructs. “As blind people have to acquire many concepts through language with less or without direct sensory experience, Pring (1988) hypothesized that their semantic networks contain more abstract concepts. Furthermore, it was consequently argued that blind people prefer data-driven strategies.” However, if we go into the brain, we neither find a self, a concept, a semantic network nor a strategy. All of these are of course covert verbal behaviors which are functionally related, that is, caused by, overt behavior or public speech.

These researchers still mainly believe in the supremacy of the information-processing model of spoken communication. This is why they write that “Verbal information is considered as mostly referential for humans.” Presumably, verbal behavior is caused by and referring to something inside of us. However,  “Spoken words can carry additional affective information about the inner state of the speaker, but as humans also understand, for example, written text, it is clear that language mainly contains other than emotional (non-referential) information.” They do seem to realize the lack of explanatory power of the information processing model. Yet, not this model, but their ignorance about the SVB/NVB distinction, causes them to write “Contrary to human words, animal vocalizations were considered predominantly to be affective (inner-state-based) communicative signals.” Had they known about this distinction, they would have never written that “animal vocalizations” are different from “human words” because they are “affective (inner-state-based) communicative signals.” Human vocalizations, like animal vocalizations, are primarily affective. The many problems we have around expressing and understanding our own emotions are directly related to our unscientific assumptions about these so-called inner-states.

Although we may talk day in day out about our feelings, there is no entity, no self who possesses a feeling. Although we speak about having a language or possessing language skills, there is nobody inside of us owns these abilities. We find ourselves without words under certain circumstances in the very same way that we can only find ourselves with German words under German circumstances. The language we speak has nothing to with us, individually. The common belief that we cause our own behavior is a falsehood, which wreaks mental health problems of gigantic proportions. Shooting ourselves in the foot could be a good thing if it would make us aware about why we were doing that. We turn our theoretical, metaphorical gun on ourselves as there is nowhere else to aim than at our own head. The uni-directionality of what can be considered ‘gun-logic’ doesn’t and can’t explain the bi-directionality of the environment-organism relationship.

If we stop being carried away by ‘our’ words, by the “meaning” of ‘our’ language, it can become clear to us that all organisms produce different sounds under different circumstances. Humans sound very different too, depending on whether they are in a threatening or a safe situation. “Morton concluded that atonal, low-pitched signals bear aggressive meaning, while tonal and high-pitched signals express sub-ordinance or the lack of aggressiveness.” No matter how much language we acquire, we still sound like that. This biological account of how we sound is needed to make sense of why we talk the way we do. 

“As this observation was based on acoustic signals of several unrelated species, Morton therefore assumed that these rules could be “universal”, at least among mammals and birds.” Our vocalizations are not learned, ontogenetic processes, but they are innate, phylogenetic processes. “So in many species”, humans included, “such vocalizations seem to have a clear genetic basis and emerge during development without significant environmental influence.” There is, of course, “significant environmental influence” on how we sound. We sing sad or happy songs depending on our circumstances. If we were raised with love and care, we produce different sounds than when we were raised with harshness and neglect. No matter how much this is hidden by what we say, how we sound always informs us about our behavioral history. 

Stated differently, we produce higher rates of SVB, if we were securely attached, but we will produce higher rates of NVB, if we were insecurely attached. Certainly, our rates can differ and during our lifetime either our rates of SVB or NVB go up. “More recently several studies found that vocal signals of many species can be also strongly context specific, while they share probably the same motivational state.” These researchers keep assuming that “they share probably the same motivational state” in spite of the fact that these observed behaviors are already parsimoniously explained by classical and operant conditioning.

November 13, 2015

November 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear reader,

I changed my letter type as I am feeling more serious about explaining the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) than ever before. Students have noticed that their rate of SVB has increased and their rate of NVB has decreased over the course of the semester. This is not a miracle, but a consequence of my teaching. I have given them positive feedback for their SVB and I have ignored and extinguished their NVB. Without that an increase in the rate of SVB and a decrease in NVB cannot and will not occur. Each of the  papers that were written is evidence that I was successful in increasing their SVB. As I had stated at the beginning of the semester: their success in achieving more SVB is my success and we have enjoyed this class together. I have kept my promise. Since I do as I say, I want the reader to take time to reflect on the importance of correspondence between saying and doing.

To the extent that there is correspondence between what you say and do, you engage in SVB and to the extent that you say one thing, but do something else, you engage in NVB. Your actions are in tune with what you say only when you produce SVB. Your behavior could not, was not and is not going to be in tune with what you say as long as you are having NVB. The reason for this discrepancy is that you make a difference between talking and acting, while both are, of course, behaviors. The saying that “actions speak louder than words” is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Presumably, we create a bigger impact by what we do then by what we say. Supposedly, there is a difference between the two. The word “louder”, which can only be understood as an increase in volume while speaking, is used here metaphorically, and presumably it expresses something of greater importance.

When we sound louder while we speak we raise our voice and the intensity of what we say is increased by the sound of our voice, which is bound to be experienced by the listener as an aversive stimulus. We only do this to force, attack, dominate, distract, upset, challenge or harass each other. We don’t do this if we are at peace with each other and happily affiliating. Thus, we have NVB in the former and SVB in the latter. What we do can be just as aversive or as appetitive as what we say. That there is a difference between the two is a fabrication maintained by NVB.

The fiction that there is a difference between what we say and what we do is perpetuated by NVB. SVB, by contrast, dismantles the way in which we are not only befooling each other, but also ourselves. The words we speak so loudly are ineffective actions. Likewise, actions that supposedly speak louder than words are ineffective actions too. We only feel the need to turn up the volume and scream when we are frustrated as we know we are ineffective. When we are effective we have no such inclination. When we respect and like each other, we get along well as our impact on each other is positive. The false notion of action speaking louder than words doesn’t occur when we have SVB.

Your rate of SVB didn’t increase as you decided to increase it. Also, your habit to have NVB was not your choice. We created an environment in class in which SVB could happen and it happened. It only happened to the extent that we created and maintained this environment together. You have seen and heard each time it was no longer the case and NVB took over. Our classroom is a miniature version of our world which consists of many different environments. Wherever we are, either we enjoy our relationships as we create and maintain a good atmosphere together or we find ourselves on own, competing and struggling with one another. 

I have demonstrated to you we are no longer alone, but together. I have given you an experience of what being together is like and what it sounds like. We sound very different when we are connected or disconnected. I believe that we are isolated due to how we talk. Even if we are together and talk, we don’t really connect with each other. NVB separates the speaker from the listener and this separation already occurs within each speaker.

No matter how much or how loud we speak, no matter how much we demand the attention from each other with our actions, no matter whether others can be forced to listen to us or can be told what  to do, our NVB can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. The separation between the speaker and the listener within the skin of the speaker him or herself is a natural consequence of our repeated exposure to NVB. This separation dissolves with more exposure to SVB. Moreover, as the separation between the speaker and the listener within the speaker dissolves, it will also dissolve in the listener. When the listener began to speak and listen simultaneously, you my dear reader, began to participate again in SVB. Me, the teacher, and you, the student, we were having SVB as there was no separation between me as the speaker and you as the listener. I, as a speaker am also the listener. I am, but I also was like you and I am listening to myself each time I speak with you. You could also speak and simultaneously listen. I reinforce your SVB in spoken and in written form.