November 20, 2015

November 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) the speaker experiences him or herself as a listener and the listener experiences him or herself simultaneously as a speaker. Since we are already familiar with high rates of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), we are used to the separation of the speaker from the listener. Consequently, only a few people, who are presumably experts or authorities, do most of the talking, while most of us, although we may also do some of the talking, remain mainly listeners. To increase the rates of SVB these listeners must become speakers. 

Instead of trying to stop NVB speakers, which makes any speaker into a NVB speaker, we need to avoid listening to NVB speakers and start listening to SVB speakers. As long as we keep engaging in NVB, we keep separating the speaker from the listener and we cannot achieve any kind of unity. In SVB we truly speak with one voice, which represents our well-being. When in SVB each speaker listens to him or herself, while he or she speaks, we stimulate each other’s wellbeing while we talk. In SVB we co-regulate each other, but in NVB we dis-regulate each other. Indeed in NVB, the speaker prevents the listener from becoming a speaker. In SVB, on the other hand, the speaker stimulates the speaker to become a speaker and the listener stimulates the speaker to become a listener. These are natural, audible and noticeable processes. 

It is often stated by so-called experts that there is a lack of listening, but that is not the problem. The problem is: there is too much listening and too little talking. We can only hear ourselves when we talk and we are not used to listening to ourselves while we speak as we don’t talk enough to be able to pay attention to this important phenomenon. Moreover, in most of our conversations we are not stimulated to listen to ourselves. Our best chance to listen to ourselves while we speak is when we are alone and take time to talk out loud. Only this convinces us it is possible and necessary to speak and listen simultaneously. We have already done it, but to increase our SVB with others we must first talk with ourselves. Our tendency to listen to others or to make others listen to us has kept us outward oriented, verbally fixated and struggling for attention. Most importantly, it has prevented us from speaking with the sound that makes us feel good. We can only hear that sound while we produce it.

November 19, 2015

November 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Although, obviously, the speaker and the listener are one within each person, you will very often not be able to experience this oneness. Your private speech, that is, what the speaker says to the listener within his or her own skin, is conflicted due to your public speech. Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) private is speech that is caused by NVB public speech. When you talk out loud with yourself, you make your private speech public again. You could not do this during the NVB public speech which led to the NVB private speech. In NVB public speech you separate the listener from the speaker and, subsequently, you separate your private speech from your public speech. When you talk with your self you immediately experience that this separation was false. 

The separation between public and private speech was only there because of NVB public speech. When you talk out loud by with yourself, you effortlessly attain SVB again as there is in reality no separation between speaker and listener. That separation occurs because while talking with others we lose track of this oneness. Since we are used to NVB, we are used to experiencing the separation between listener and speaker. Since we only have had brief moments of SVB, we don’t experience the continuation of the speaker as one with the listener while we talk. If we would experience that oneness within ourselves while we talk with others more often, we would that find this oneness within ourselves will also make us feel one with whom we talk. In other words, when speaker and listener are experienced by the speaker as one within him or herself, then the speaker and the listener who is not the speaker are also experienced as one. In SVB the speaker and the listener outside of each other’s skin are experienced as one. This oneness is neither caused by the speaker nor by the listener, but by both simultaneously. Neither the speaker nor the listener is causing his or her own behavior.

Since speaking and listening happen simultaneously, they become joined. Thus, in SVB, by joining your speaking and listening behavior, the speaker and the listener within the skin of the speaker and outside the skin of the speaker become joined. All SVB communicators experience oneness and effortless agreement with each other. This agreement is based on the unity of the speaker and the listener. Speakers are not only ‘sending’ and listeners are not only ‘receiving’ as speakers are listeners and listeners are also speakers. The latter is where most of the work has to be done: SVB makes SVB speakers out of listeners.    

November 18, 2015

November 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

It is so incredibly satisfying to have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Even if you are engaging in SVB just by yourself you will realize the benefits. At some point SVB will increase and there is nothing you do to make this happen. It can and will increase as you finally understand that you are not causing it. This is, in my view, one of the most important aspects of behaviorism: that you don’t cause your own behavior. As long as you think you cause your own behavior you will be in trouble. However, as long as you still believe in some esoteric explanation of why you act the way you act, instead of how your behavior is shaped by your environment, you will have no reality to your life whatsoever.

Stated differently, as long as you try to change your behavior, you misunderstand how it actually works. This misunderstanding will be evident in your covert, private speech, in what you say to yourself, as well as in your overt, public speech, in what you say to others. What you think and how you talk will be part of what I call Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In NVB you think that you cause your own behavior and you also believe that other people are causing their own behavior. This unscientific view about yourself and others inevitably gives rise to problems. If talking misrepresents the reality, you are in constant conflict.

The conflict which occurs in NVB is between the speaker and the listener. In NVB, you construe these two as if you are either one or the other. However, you are both. Whether you know it or not, you are simultaneously the speaker and the listener. You cannot get away from this fact and you will be troubled by it as long as you have not understood it correctly. Since the speaker and the listener are one within each person, there must be a way of talking in which this oneness is properly expressed and can remain intact. This is SVB. You can have SVB all by yourself. By talking out loud and by listening to yourself, you can verify that indeed the speaker and the listener are one and the same person. By exploring SVB on your own, you will also find that although this way of talking is possible with others, it is most of the time impossible. In other words, in most conversations the speaker and the listener are experienced as separate. You accept that one person is the speaker and the other is the listener; one person presumably sends and the other receives. In this process of sending and receiving we assume that disembodied information floats miraculously from the sender to the receiver, who subsequently encodes, stores and retrieves this information. All of this is not how Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) really works.      

November 17, 2015

November 17, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

I no longer feel like specifically addressing my writing to my students. I thought that as they are the ones I talk with most of the time that it would be useful to direct my attention to them, but by doing so I find my writing become narrowed down to a level which is not that interesting to me anymore. Although many students write wonderful things in their papers, they are for the most part not really interested in behaviorism. This is  understandable since they haven’t been exposed to it and it is not my role to do this. I am assigned to teach the Principles of Psychology and behaviorism is only one of the many theoretical perspectives covered in the book we use. I cannot insist too much on behaviorism as that would make me come across as against these other approaches, which, of course, I am. By changing my audience again to only those who want to talk with me and have at least some preliminary interest in behaviorism, I do myself a big favor. I hesitate to write this for fear of losing my job.

Although most behaviorists are not responding, I find it still more interesting to direct my attention to them, as a few of them have responded positively. I am not going for quantity, but for quality. However, I am also addressing a population, who, due to their behavioral history, is ready to be taught, by me, in my extension of behaviorism: the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)/ Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction. I am teaching a new phenomenon which only very few people are already somewhat aware of. My joy is in addressing them and that is all that matters.  

Since most people, due to their previous conditioning, are not into SVB, I am not interested anymore in their NVB. It is more of the same old nonsense and I am not going to pretend as if there is anything good about it. To me NVB is something to be avoided. For a long time, I have tried in vain to change people, but this has only caused me trouble. Of course, for a long time, I myself didn’t know anything at all about behaviorism and in retrospect that was the biggest part of my problem. Now that I have acquired scientific understanding of behavior, I am not as emotionally attached as I used to be. This is a tremendous relief. I still at times am surprised I am no longer troubled by leaving people behind who are incapable of having SVB with me.

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.