Auditory
Tomatis Therapy
Spatial Orientation
Ears and eyes working together is vital for successful school and everyday life. Follow this web link explaining more about Tomatis therapy and how it works. Dr. Alfred Tomatis did a lot of research and found that if he trained dyslexics and stutterers to be right ear dominant, it usually solved a lot of the difficulties associated with being dyslexic and stuttering. Follow this link for some case studies.
There is a direct relation between the visual system and the vestibular system. Dr. Alfred Tomatis used to talk about the relationship between the visual integrator and the vestibular integrator. Ideally people need to be right ear dominant. If you are not right ear dominant there is a fractional delay. The fractional delay in auditory processing caused by left ear dominance causes students to present themselves as being dyslexic, stuttering or slow in auditory processing. Unfortunately because of the early start of the education system in the UK many students can not switch over from left to right ear dominance naturally between the ages of five and six.
The left hemisphere of the brain contains our auditory processing centres and the primary processing centres for:
- Speech
- Speech comprehension
- Emotions
- Hearing
- Language comprehension
The left side of our brain is connected to the right side of the body. The right ear therefore has a more direct connection to the auditory processing centres. If the right ear is dominant, it channels sound directly to these centres. Research has shown that if the right ear is the dominant ear for directing sound to the brain, we are better able to process what we hear, the response time is faster and there is a better emotional response.
If the left ear is dominant sounds need to travel to the left brain hemisphere after it travels to the right brain hemisphere first. It needs to cross the corpus collosum that connects the two brain hemispheres. This delay make students not only slow but also causing auditory confusion, reversals of letters/numbers or words, and stuttering. If you are left ear dominant you relate to sound principally through the lower frequencies with wavelengths between 35Hz and 140Hz. This causes an effect that make you feel distant from the source of the sound. The higher frequencies give meaning in language because they define consonants and also carries the emotional content of the message.
We think it is very important to make sure that students are right ear dominant. The reason is that your eyes and ears are connected!! I always tell parents during assessments that you need visual auditory processing and auditory visual processing. You need to see to hear and you need to hear to see. Please look at this diagram to explain the connection of the ear and the eye as explained Maude le Roux. Auditory Neurology presentation presented by Maude le Roux, 2015, Tomatis consultant.
Ear to the eye cranial nerve III and VI.
Cranial nerve III is Oculomotor and cranial nerve VI is Abducens, which controls the movement of a single muscle, the lateral rectus muscle of the eye.
Here is a very interesting article explaining that music influence the size of you pupils of which below is an extract.
” Emotions function to optimise adaptive responses to biologically significant events. In the auditory channel, humans are highly attuned to emotional signals in speech and music that arise from shifts in the frequency spectrum, intensity, and rate of acoustic information. We found that changes in acoustic attributes that evoke emotional responses in speech and music also trigger emotions when perceived in environmental sounds, including sounds arising from human actions, animal calls, machinery, or natural phenomena, such as wind and rain. The findings align with Darwin’s hypothesis that speech and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in the environment. “
It’s Music to Our Eyes: Emotional Reactions to Music Reflected in Pupil Size, Neuroscience News, November 2015.
Forbrain
What is Forbrain?
Forebrain is a unique bone conducting headset for auditory processing. It improves the following:
- Attention
- Speech
- Memory
Forbrain’s dynamic filter trains the brain to be more attentive improving not only attention but auditory processing and sensory integration. It helps people to improve speech fluency, pronunciation, sound discrimination and rhythm, for clearer and more effective communication. It helps people to improve short term memory, which impacts such skills as reading, writing and even chatting.
CVT 