Disclaimer
Laurna Tallman is not a physician or medically trained. She is a citizen scientist who invented Focused Listening™ music therapy, which led her to important discoveries about the neurology of human behavior.
The information on this website, including the information in books and other documents and phone applications available free or for sale from this website, is based on literature reviews and clinical research, observation, and the reporting of people who have used Focused Listening™ music therapy. While details regarding therapy and drug treatment are described, this information should not be taken as medical advice, directly or indirectly, nor should it be a substitute for the medical advice of a physician. If readers taking a psychiatric drug wish to discontinue, they are advised to talk directly to a physician expert in low-drug or non-drug therapies. Neither the web host nor the author will be held responsible for the results of any path, therapy, or treatment undertaken as a result of reading books and other documents offered at these websites, the content of the sites, or of the mobile phone applications. The author disclaims any warranty of any kind, whether expressed or implied, as to any matter relating to these books and websites, including without limitation its merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. In no event shall the publisher or author be liable for any direct or indirect, special, or incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the materials and information in these books and websites. Readers are invited to compare Laurna Tallman’s discoveries, clinical observations, and anecdotal reporting with the scientific research of others in this field. User’s of Focused Listening™ music therapy do so at their own risk.
A Discovery
People have recognized the healing effects of music for thousands of years, which is why we sing and play musical instruments. Today, millions of people listen to music amplified through headphones, earbuds, and various kinds of audio amplifiers for voice and instruments. Do they have any idea what they are doing to their ears, their brains, and their health? Maybe not. We hear a lot about the harm done by listening to amplified music that is very loud, like the amplification at rock concerts. But Focused Listening™ isn’t loud. And most other healing music therapies are not loud. So what’s happening?
I am Laurna Tallman. My experiment with ordinary, inexpensive headphones focused high-frequency music only on the right ear of a 26-year-old schizophrenic man (our middle son Dan). After using the music therapy daily, for about six weeks, his tiny amount of medication was withdrawn. (That was my husband Richard’s idea.) He quickly became mentally and emotionally normal. His schizophrenia symptoms vanished. His addictions remained, but he soon showed that he was in a stronger mental condition to combat them. Think about those factors! Ordinary headphones. Used for 1 to 2 hours a day for about six weeks. Classical violin music. Using only the right ear. Not loud. No drugs, not even a little bit.
Millions of people are doing something similar with their headphones without having any idea what the risks or benefits might be! Focused Listening™ healed schizophrenia, a serious mental illness, so something powerful was happening. I knew that medical practitioners and their followers (some psychologists, physiotherapist, or simply parents of disabled children) have used binaural (both ears) headphones to heal dyslexia, bipolarity, and depression. Why isn’t the world excited about this? I think the answer is: because the experts did not understand the exact cause of the illness or the precise mechanism of healing. They knew what they were trying to do sometimes or often worked and they speculated about those things, but they did not know the essential cause of the conditions they were trying to heal.
Two years later, following a hit of LSD, our son’s symptoms of psychosis started to return. Going back on the extremely small dose of medication made his symptoms much worse. While he used Focused Listening™, I did the research, which means not only my own experiments and observations but hundreds of research papers; dozens of books, newspaper and magazine articles, brochures, and other data; online resources showing anatomy, surgeries, and devices; blogs by people who were/are schizophrenic or by people supporting the mentally ill in some way. All of that inquiry led me to be able to explain how music therapies work (when they do), and why they do not work (when they don’t). Most importantly, I joined my own observations and experimental results with discoveries by a neurologist (V.S. Ramachandran) and an otolaryngologist (Alfred Tomatis). A close personal friend, the late Jerome Goldstein, a neurologist well known in the San Francisco gay community, did not comment on my discoveries per se but suggested references and contributed one of his conference papers. You can read more about my discoveries in greater detail here. I call my discovery of a scientific, umbrella theory of human behavior the Tallman Neurological Paradigm™.
This time, Dan’s healing took longer, which gave me a chance to see what was happening during the healing process. He passed through about seven stages, each of which could be labeled as a different type of mental illness. In other words, Focused Listening™ could heal other mental illnesses. And those other mental illnesses formed a spectrum of ear-related mental states with physical syndromes. So, you could say there are only one or two kinds of mental illnesses but half a dozen levels of severity, depending on which ear (or both) has a weak middle ear muscle and how weak it is. Or, you could say there is only one kind of mental illness: sound deprivation to the brain caused by a weakness in one or the other ear or both of them.
You need to add that the symptoms of mental illnesses can be created by depriving people of sound in other ways, such as solitary confinement, a home in a wilderness or even a rural setting, the silence of the library stacks where grad students can disappear for weeks and months, a monastery, a nursing home for seniors. You can imagine other scenarios. People need to learn how to provide themselves with healthy sound environments: with their own singing, by playing appropriate musical instruments, by turning on the radio to stations playing stringed instruments, by attending concerts without electronic amplification, and by limiting headphone listening to no more than two hours per day. Learning about the kinds of assaults that can harm the ear is another important aspect of auditory hygiene.
The Tallman Neurological Paradigm™ of right-ear-driven left-brain dominance opens a new frontier of understanding about the ways ear function affects the reception of sound into the brain to cause specific patterns of human behavior, both normal and aberrant.
I am among those finding drug-free treatments for mental illness and certain other conditions. Notice that, again, the healing process could not become complete until the tiny amount of medication was withdrawn. This proof that even minuscule amounts of noxious substances, such as a psychiatric drug or cannabis, can harm the ear is another important outcome of my experiments.
The success that people have reported about their use of Focused Listening™ for a wide range of conditions made me aware of what headphone users potentially are doing to themselves if they do not understand their own audiology and neurology. To make healthy choices about amplified sound, a person needs to know the limits of their ear muscles’ health under exposure to amplified sound, and the effects of their listening practices on their ears, their brains, and their behavior. Some people are improving their hearing. Some people are perpetuating problems. Some people are harming themselves.
The best place to start is with an audiogram. A professional assessment of hearing is more likely to be accurate. However, there are online websites that show you how to take your own audiogram. The audiologist will not know what you can learn here and from my other writing. And my knowledge of audiograms as they relate to behavior is derived primarily from Guy Bérard’s book Hearing Equals Behavior. If the apps and my websites encourage people to share their audiograms with me, I would like to have that data to analyze and share (anonymously, of course) with my readers.
Another aspect of my research is the effect of recreational and medically prescribed drugs on ear function, brain function, behavior, and health more generally. The people using Focused Listening™ for their schizophrenia, bipolarity, depression, dyslexic syndrome, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue, drug-withdrawal symptoms, and other conditions who have reported their problems and their success to me, allow me to share their learning with you (with their permission, of course).
Focused Listening™ is not the appropriate therapy for all “mental” conditions. A binaural therapy may be more appropriate for certain conditions, such as depression. When the right ear is entirely deaf, simply focusing music on the left ear is likely to make an existing energy imbalance in the brain even worse. An analysis of the individual’s hearing problems, based on professional audiograms, is essential in such cases.
Spiritual Health through Music
Bibliographies