| How Tomatis works | Who can benefit | Research studies | Overview |
T he
DLS Treatment Process |
The Listening Program (TLP) |
Learning doesn't have to be hard... More on Tomatis
Make
Learning and Development Change Naturally with Tomatis-
There are 5 scientific
principles that demonstrate a connection between the voice, the ear, and
the brain. Sound therapy repatterns, establishes, and/or enlivens these
connections so that the body receives the information more clearly,
thereby allowing learning and general developmental functioning to
develop along a natural continuum. As a result, listening improves,
thinking becomes clearer, processing is enhanced, reading is easier and
better understood, movement and coordination skills improve, language
becomes more meaningful, and attention and focus improves. The
neuroplasticity of the brain supports the changes and overall learning
and development can improve.
The key is to address the basic problem, not just the symptoms, of learning
difficulties. The Tomatis Method offers a solution for many of our students at
risk. The Tomatis Method affects a learner's ability and motivation to
communicate and process information more effectively. This allows a problem
learner to be transformed into a receptive and motivated learner. The teacher
now has someone who can and wants to learn.
The Tomatis Method of
sound stimulation, used worldwide for nearly half a century, has proven
successful in helping children, adolescents, and adults improve their learning
skills. It also helps bring out the gifts and talents we all have, allowing us
to access our abilities and skills, even those that are not overtly evident. In
other words, it helps us expand our potential. It is as appropriate for
those with learning disabilities, or challenges, as one of our clients describes
them, to those who are gifted in all walks of life.
We believe people learn best if (1) they have the functional ability to perceive and process information effectively and (2) they are motivated to do so. The Tomatis Method addresses both these needs. When we develop listening as the foundation for learning through language and communication, we get to the basic skill we've been seeking for decades.
The Listening Program helps people:
Learning and
Listening
To become a
good learner, we have to become a good listener. That is easier said than done,
but fortunately Tomatis has developed a highly effective method to make you a
good listener, and thereby a better learner.
Hearing and
listening are not one and the same. As you will see, there is a huge difference
between the two. It is good "listening" we are after. However, good hearing is
the foundation of good listening! Therefore, we will then look at those aspects
of hearing that impact our listening ability. We will also look at what else
our ears do for us. You are in for an interesting ride into a land of science,
unknown to many people. Ready?
Excellent
Hearers and Poor Listeners
Listening is
a specialized form of hearing. Listening, not hearing, is the primary
function of the ear. Tomatis makes a clear distinction between hearing and
listening:
|
Hearing is a passive process. It is merely detecting the sounds around us. |
|
Listening is an active process.
It requires the conscious
desire to determine the meaning of what we hear. |
We can have
excellent hearing but be poor listeners.
Many children with learning difficulties or attention deficit have excellent
hearing, according to the school audiologist, but still cannot read well or
concentrate. Their problem is a listening problem, not a hearing problem.
Good
hearing is the foundation of good listening,
making sense of what we
hear. So, what type of hearing problems could lead to listening, and thus
learning problems? That is the topic of the next chapters.
The function
of the ear is much too complex to describe it fully here. For our purposes, we
will focus on a few functions only. When sounds enter the ear, they first come
to the eardrum. Like a musical drum, it needs to be stretched. That is done by
two tiny muscles that control the hammer and the stirrup. If they are too weak
(because of recurring ear infections, for example), sounds do not enter the
inner ear well, but are distorted. One of the breakthroughs of Tomatis is that
he has been able to come up with a Listening Program to tune up these muscles.
We will talk about the benefits of this program later on.
Once the sounds enter the inner ear, they stimulate the vestibule, and are
analyzed by the cochlea. The vestibule is the most ancient part of the
ear. It controls balance, coordination, muscle tone, and every single muscle in
our body, including the muscles of our eyes. It helps us to fight the pull of
gravity and is actively involved in each step that leads the brain to process
sensory information. Eye-hand coordination, strangely enough, also depends on
the good functioning of the ear! Walking, dancing, running, riding a bike,
climbing stairs or a cliff, writing a letter are all activities requiring the
vestibular system to work optimally. It also constantly informs us about our
body moving through space.
The vestibule is really the manager
of our body.
What are
the signs of vestibular dysfunction?
Poor posture, clumsiness,
jerky or fidgety movements, messy handwriting, poor sensory integration,
avoidance of physical activities or sports are often signs of a sign of
vestibular dysfunction. Because the vestibule affects so many of our basic
functions, children or adults with vestibular difficulties often have learning
disabilities.
Jean Ayres,
a pioneer in the study of sensory integration, pointed out that
when the vestibule is
under-stimulated, kids can become hyperactive.
To compensate for the lack of auditory stimulation, the kid will move around
continuously. Unfortunately, the kid does not get a lot of benefit from it, as
the vestibule is not able to translate it into a genuine stimulation of the
brain.
Can hearing
too much harm us? Yes, it can. To become a good listener, we need not only to be
able to "zoom in"
on information as but also to
"zoom out"
(or filter out) irrelevant background information. Good listeners have a zoom
lens in their ears!
|
|
Good listeners
hear the sounds and all its nuances correctly. Good listeners push
irrelevant stimuli to the background. Good listeners focus and
concentrate. Good listeners do not feel disturbed by the bombardment of
sensory information we all get. Good listeners sort and organize the
relevant information into meaningful hierarchies. |
|
|
Poor listeners,
on the other hand, don't have the ability to "zoom out", filter out
irrelevant information. Poor listeners have only one defensive against
this continuous bombardment of information: to tune out. That is what
ADD children and adults do. |
So, why do
some people lack this defensive? Jean Ayres relates this problem to a vestibular
problem. In this case, the vestibule does not act as a gatekeeper. It lets
everything through. There is an additional reason, but to understand this one,
we have to introduce a new concept.
We don’t
hear with our ears only.
We also hear through the bones of our body.
Bone, indeed, conducts sound very well. When we talk, we hear ourselves through
our ears (air conduction) and through the vibrations of our bones (bone
conduction). That is why we do not recognize our own voice when it is recorded.
When our voice is on tape, we no longer have the benefit of the bone conduction
sound. It cannot be reproduced on tape. The voice we hear inside will never be
the voice others hear on the. That’s why people often swear the voice on the
tape is not theirs. Still, we each know it’s ours because the words and
inflections are ours.
In order to
learn, we need to be able to hear the internal bone vibrations.
If, for whatever reason, we’ve tuned these vibrations out, learning becomes very
difficult. They are the vibrations that make the internal sound when we read
silently. They are the thoughts that we hear just milliseconds before we speak.
When a door
is slammed without warning, or the tires of a car suddenly screech in the
street, our body shudders instinctively. That's because we felt the sound before
we heard it. Our body reacted faster than our ears. Bone conduction momentarily
took over air conduction. Interestingly enough, Attention Deficit Hyperactive
Disorder (ADHD) children and adults experience this all the time.
People with ADHD and ADD listen
too much with their bodies, they hear too much through bone conduction.
The problem is that they do
not have a mechanism to selectively screen out sensory information that enters
through the body. Therefore, people with ADD and ADHD have to either
|
|
Pay
attention to all input |
|
|
Screen all input all out. |
The
Listening Program trains your ears to become the main entrance to sounds, and
make your bone conduction the secondary entrance. That way, the sounds can be
processed in the correct way.
We'll do it by having
you listen to gated music through a special headphone that is equipped with a
vibrator. Through the vibrator you'll listen with your body, at the same time as
you listen with your ears. Over time, you will adjust to listening primarily
with your ears.
Desensitizing the bone conduction reduces the stress and gives them the ability
to pay attention and learn more effectively.
We will also
train you to correctly use the bone conduction. One of its functions is to
forewarn the ear that sound is coming. This can be best illustrated with an
example. When you want someone to really pay attention, you tap them on their
shoulder and say: hey listen! The function of the bone is exactly the same: it
says to the ear: hey listen! Ideally, the ear should obey to this command almost
instantaneously. In people with ADD and ADHD, however, it can take a relatively
long time. So, their ears are not ready to process the incoming sounds in time.
Fortunately, we can remedy this. When we start the training, will send the
sounds to the bone a long time before it is sent to the ear (up to 250
milliseconds in case of severe Attention Deficit). Over time we will gradually
reduce the interval to a few milliseconds only,
getting your brain adjusted to the
proper use of your bone conduction.
Children
with autism often suffer unbearable pain because of auditory
hypersensitivity. When you "feel too much", you cannot pay attention.
Unconsciously, you will cut off the source of your suffering and become aloof
and detached.
When we work
with autistic children and adults, our first goal is to desensitize them
(paradoxically through the use of sounds).
Sound is a
very complex mixture of hundreds of frequencies, of varying intensities. Even
the most sophisticated computers have trouble analyzing it. That is why "voice
recognition systems" are still so imperfect. The part of our ear that is
responsible for analyzing sounds is called the cochlea. It must
analyze the sounds quickly and accurately. People with dyslexia often
have problems in this respect.
The cochlea's first task is to analyze which frequencies the sound contains.
That is easier said than done. Each sound has a base frequency and so called
"higher harmonics." Some sounds have nearly the same base frequency, and differ
only in the higher harmonics. For example, a "B" and "P" have similar base
frequencies; likewise, a "T" and a "D." Computers have difficulties telling them
apart, and so have learning disabled people. When someone says to them "Bob,"
they are not sure what was said: it could be "Bob" or "Pop." By the time they
have figured out what was said, the speaker is already in his next sentence.
Consequently, they process language at a slower rate than those whose ear works
well. They have an auditory processing delay problem! Still those
children or adults swear that they do hear well; furthermore, a hearing test
does not show any hearing loss.
What would
you do if you had such a problem? At first, you would do your utmost to catch
up, costing you a lot of energy. You may get exhausted, be constantly tired. You
would now and then answer the wrong question, making you feel dumb. At one point
in time, after having tried too many times in vain, you may decide to bail out.
You do not really pay attention to what people say any more. Lacking the
stimulating discussions, you stop growing. Behind your back, people are saying
that you are not very smart, and somewhat immature. To make things worse,
auditory processing problems make reading a struggle as well.
To make things more complicated, each sound lasts a specific time. The ear
constantly has to adjust to these rapid changes. When it does not, the eyes and
ears are no longer in synch. The right sound is not put together with the right
letter. Without the sound, the letter remains dead. The meaning cannot emerge.
The dyslexic is left second-guessing, hoping for a miracle, taking the chance to
utter finally a sound that might fit the letter of the alphabet dancing on the
page.
Most auditory processing problems can be addressed by reprogramming the way we
listen. It makes a huge difference: not only will we learn more easily, but our
thinking will become clearer and our organizational skills make a quantum
leap."
Did you know
that your right ear has a different job to do than your left ear? Did you know
that we all have a dominant ear? Did you know that it makes a hell of a
difference whether your right or left ear is your dominant ear?
Tomatis discovered that people who
are right ear dominant learn much easily than those who are left ear dominant.
In hindsight, that is
quite logical. The right ear is directly connected to the left brain, the brain
that processes language. That is a direct, fast connection. If you listen with
your left ear, the sounds first go to the right brain. That part of the brain
has no language center and, therefore, the information has to be rerouted to the
left brain via the Corpus Callosum. Because that’s a longer pathway, the
information is delayed.
Left-ear-dominant people thus have to play catch-up all the time.
Not only is the information late,
it is also incomplete. In the transfer from the right brain to the left brain,
some of the higher frequencies are lost. As we have seen before, these are the
frequencies that are key to distinguish similar sounds (like a B and a P).
Left-ear-dominant people
thus not only have to play catch-up, they also have to play with an incomplete
deck.
Tomatis
also discovered that our speech is controlled by our ears.
People who are right-ear dominant are better able to control the parameters of
voice and speech … its intensity, frequency, timber, rhythm, flow of sentences.
It is one of the reasons why many great actors and singers trained with Tomatis!
Ear
dominance also impacts our emotional well-being.
In 1975, Badenhorst, a
researcher, wrote:
“Right-ear
dominant subjects displayed a superior capacity to relate spontaneously
and appropriately to
emotional stimuli. They also displayed a more extroverted
orientation, were more
responsive and in control of their emotional responses and
were less prone to
anxiety, frustration and aggression.”
The Tomatis
Listening Program will help you use your right ear more effectively.
Towards the end of the
program, we'll gradually shift the sounds from the left ear to the right ear.
You'll also do some reading exercises through a microphone coupled with our
electronic equipment. We'll filter your voice and return it exclusively to your
right ear. Over time,
you'll become right ear dominant, and read, learn and speak better.
When we
think about our ears, we usually focus on hearing. That is certainly the most
obvious function, but there is more to the ear than hearing. Tomatis point out
that several functions of the ear are as important. All of these functions are
taken into account in the Tomatis Listening Program .
|
|
Our ears control balance, coordination, verticality, muscle tone and the
muscles of our eyes.
This is the role of the
vestibule. The vestibule is also an important relay for all the sensory
information that our body sends to our brain. Children who have
vestibular problems, often have sensory integration difficulties. |
|
|
Our ears analyze sounds,
which is especially
important for language comprehension. This is done in the Cochlea. |
|
|
Our ears relay all sensory information to the brain.
To achieve this, the
vestibule and the cochlea have to work in perfect harmony. They act as
a relay station between the nervous system and the brain. Touch, vision
and hearing, all are interpreted through our vestibular-cochlear system. |
|
|
Our ears give us energy.
Our ears play an important role in stimulating the brain. Tomatis says
it this way: "The ear can be compared to a dynamo (a powerful motor)
which transforms the stimulations it receives into neurological energy
intended to feed the brain." When the brain is well "charged", there
seems to be no lack of energy to innovate, imagine or create. However,
not all sounds act alike:
Common Causes of Listening Problems
During our lives, many events can affect our ability to hear and to
listen, causing the appearance of learning disabilities. Perhaps, it’s
not so much a learning disability as a listening inability. Here are
just a few common ones:
Click here for a checklist to see if you have listening problems |
Still skeptical? READ ON!!!
|
||||
|
|
||||
