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, include the information in books and other materials, and its associated phone application is based on 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 and 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 offered at this website, the content of the site, or of the phone application. 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.
Discoveries
People have recognized the healing effects of music for thousands of years. Laurna Tallman’s “umbrella” neurological theory, the Tallman 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 abnormal.
Laurna Tallman is among those finding harmless treatments for mental illnesses. The success other people have reported about applying Focused Listening™ to their schizophrenia, bipolarity, depression, dyslexic syndrome, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses supports her discovery that the strength of the right middle ear muscle is fundamental to mental and physical health.
The Tallman Neurological Paradigm™ states: The flow of high-frequency sound through the right ear normally creates an energy stream that drives the left half of the brain to dominate the right half of the brain in their interactive processes. How does that flow of high-frequency sound change the ear and behavior? The “domination” of the left-brain is a matter of timing. Normally, for the purposes of hearing language and responding with speech, right-ear sounds arrive in the left-brain ahead of left-ear sounds. That discrepancy generally is not recognized or understood widely by doctors and neurologists. I will share what my research uncovered.
The famous French otolaryngologist Alfred Tomatis also taught anatomy at the Sorbonne. He notes that each ear has more nerve pathways running to the opposite half of the brain than to the near half. This fact does not appear in standard medical texts, unfortunately, which merely say that both ears send nerves to both halves of the brain. However, that unequal distribution is highly significant. The right ear favors the left-brain where the language centres are located. The left ear favors the right-brain where massive amounts of sensory input are loosely organized around primal needs and desires that create “emotions.” For the left-brain to be able to respond logically to what it hears with organized speech, it must listen to the logical meaning in the sound stream that it receives from the right-ear (arriving first) and the stream of emotional meaning in sound that it receives from the left ear (arriving second, because it has to cross the interhemispheric bridge from the right-brain) to understand the full meaning of the speaker. We need to pause here to consider the likelihood that the evolution of the logical language centers forming in the left-brain was a survival strategy: learning to prioritize the essential meaning in language. The default of emotional meaning to the right-brain provides other characteristics of learning that serve the purposes of the dominant left-brain.
The left-brain then (another time delay) draws on the stores of information in the right-brain (that crosses the interhemispheric bridge) to organize appropriate words (in Wernicke’s area) into the logical response of speech (in Broca’s area) that activates the larynx (i.e., from the left-brain). Yet another time delay brings the left-ear stream of sound energy from the right-brain to the larynx that gives emotionally nuanced tone to the voice — what psychiatry calls “emotional prosody.”) A person’s ability to hear, interpret, and understand language and to use language appropriately in response to what is heard takes many years to develop, even for people with excellent hearing. The ability to hear almost perfectly is far more important to that development than anyone has realized until very recently.
Our standards of hearing for children and for adults have been based on misconceptions about what is “good” or “excellent” hearing. The assumption has been made that the ability to hear sound that is extremely quiet is a level of “excellence.” In fact, people who can hear sound at very low thresholds — the ears that can hear snowflakes falling and the whispers of wind in the grass — sometimes are people with very severe mental illnesses. Some frequencies of sound cause them intense pain. Some of these people may not be able to sort out the sounds between each side of the brain, so that the process of hearing and speaking described above does not work that way for them. Instead of a choreographed sequence of steps, the perceptions of hearing are disordered so that the left-brain is unable to dominate. Instead, each half of the brain takes turns influencing thought and behavior, at about two-minute intervals.
People who hear different frequencies of sound with different levels of intensity but also not the same differences in each ear have the audio deficit Dr. Guy Bérard calls “bilateral distortions.” In his otolaryngology practice, he saw those auditory patterns in dyslexia, autism, “neurosis” (which now is called “bipolar disorder”). Since I have witnessed those patterns of behavior in people recovering from schizophrenia, I suspect bilateral distortions also are involved in schizophrenia and in juvenile schizophrenia, which is now usually called “autism.”
Bérard made progress identifying the patterns of inadequate hearing on the audiogram that describe depression. They represent losses of sound primarily to the right-brain by the left ear, although either or both ears can contribute to that sound-deprivation to the the right, emotional brain. Thus, some types of hearing anomalies that most audiologists do not take into consideration, can be used to confirm certain diagnoses of mood and cognition.
Neither Tomatis nor Bérard noticed the overarching paradigm I discovered. But I turn to their knowledge of anatomy and of the audiogram — as well as to contributions by other researchers — to explain the changes my unique, right-eared music therapy caused, first, in our schizophrenic son. And, then, in dozens of other clients over the past 16 years.
The integrative neurological patterns driven by high-frequency sound entering through the right ear also affect other mental and body systems. A fiber of the vagus network rests on the middle ear muscle (Tomatis) , carrying sound energy into that system and reflecting the effects of that sound in the system back to the ear. The ear, especially the right ear, which should be dominant (Tomatis), is pivotal to the healthy functioning of the central nervous system (the CNS), the vagus system including the parasympathetic nervous system (Tomatis), to balance, and to the body’s musculature (Tomatis).
I made that neurological discovery and others related to it while attempting to help one of our sons. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic at 16, sidelined from all the normal learning experiences of a person growing from 16 to 26. One December day in 2006, he tried on my headphones. I noticed immediately that he was responding to the music in important — because they were more normal — ways. I recalled that Alfred Tomatis thought the right ear was in some ways more important than the left ear (although the Tomatis Method we had experienced is binaural — stimulating both ears at the same time). Turning ordinary headphones into a unique, right-ear treatment, by blocking the left earpiece with a pad of facial tissues, I helped our son to experience a spectacular healing from severe schizophrenia. I named that right-eared therapy “Focused Listening™.”
His healing allowed me to draw particular neurological conclusions from my observations of certain changes — from his garbled, irrational speech and other psychosis symptoms to perfectly grammatical speech and self-controlled behavior. His addictions remained, but he had better ability to learn how to control them. Two years later, when he lost his healing following exposure to LSD, Focused Listening™ healed him again. My research led me to see that exposure to high-frequency sound strengthens a tiny muscle in the middle ear. Listening to music is an exercise program for the muscles in the middle ear. The stronger they become, the more powerfully they transmit the energy of sound into the brain. However, that becomes a problem when the ears are structurally imperfect so that the right ear is unable to dominate the hearing process. Exercising only the right ear with Focused Listening™ allows it to transmit the higher frequencies of sound more precisely and forcefully into the inner ear so those high-energy sounds can be perceived at lower volumes. The ear is not actually becoming “more sensitive,” as the follow-up audiogram suggests. The already sensitive cochlea has a stronger “feed” arriving from the middle ear. Looking at that change another way: the cochlea is no longer deprived of pure, high-frequency sounds by a weakness in the middle ear. Strengthening the right ear builds strength in the nerve networks feeding the left half of the brain, so that it can control, or learn to control, the interactive processes of the whole brain.
My counseling of people living near me in Ontario, Canada, has extended to people worldwide through my online coaching and counselling. I am among those finding harmless, non-drug treatments for mental illnesses.
Laurna Tallman