I'm looking for quality, (neuro)scientifically informed
information about increasing my verbal fluency.
GS: Neurobiology has never told us one thing about
behavior that we did not already now. The notion that
anything in neurobiology currently contributes anything
to a behavioral technology is absurd.
My linguistic abilities are fine, but I often find myself
grasping for words or unable to adequately express
myself in conversation.
GS: It is hard to see exactly what you are saying here.
The second portion of the sentence seems to contract
the first part unless "...I often find myself grasping for
words or unable to adequately express myself in
conversation" has nothing to do with "linguistic
abilities." Verbal behavior is sufficiently complicated,
and incompletely understood that your question is
difficult to answer. There may be a number of reasons
that you "...find [your]self grasping for words or unable
to adequately express [your]self in conversation." I
would find it difficult, for example, to give an hour-long
lecture on g-proteins, but would find it relatively easy to
talk for an hour on certain topics. Or your verbal
behavior may have been punished under certain
circumstances and, when the current setting resembles
those circumstances, emotional responses may interfere
with fluency. Or you may simply not have emitted
enough "free-flowing" verbal behavior for useful verbal
response classes to be produced so even though you
might get great grades on multiple choice tests on a
subject matter (i.e., you "know" the subject matter) you
are unable to pontificate in the fashion that you have
observed in others.
Any recommendations for exercises I could perform, or
resources (journal articles, books, websites, etc) I
could peruse would be much appreciated. Cheers!
GS: The answer depends on the variables controlling
your verbal behavior, so you must get at them in order
to be sure of generating a proper behavioral
intervention. On the other hand, good advice might be
to simply engage in the behavior in question with a
somewhat critical but tactful audience, thereby exposing
yourself (or your behavior) to the kinds of
contingencies of reinforcement that operated to
produce the verbal skills you seem to want to emulate.
Cordially,
Glen
"me" <freqwinci at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<lj1q9.9678
