Welcome to the website of Laurna Tallman where you can learn about Focused Listening™ music therapy and the Tallman Neurological Paradigm™.
The Tallman Neurological Paradigm™ is this: 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. That “domination” 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. And that discrepancy generally is not recognized or understood, so 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 side of the brain than to the nearby half. 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 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 stream of meaning it receives from the right-ear (arriving first) and the stream of emotion-laden sound 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. The left-brain then (another time delay) draws on the stores of information in the right-brain (that cross 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 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 I have just described 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 two-minute intervals
Ears that hear different frequencies of sound with different levels of intensity but also not the same differences in each ear is the situation Dr. Guy Berard 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.
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 heal one of our sons. He had been 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.
I am not a physician or medically trained. I am a citizen scientist who has made important discoveries about the neurology of human behavior. The information on this site should not be interpreted as medical advice. If you are taking a psychiatric drug and wish to discontinue, please do so under the supervision of a doctor. My writing is clear and honest so that readers can compare my discoveries and views with the scientific research of others in this field. People have recognized the healing effects of music for thousands of years. My “umbrella” discovery of the Tallman Paradigm™ of right-ear-driven left-brain dominance opens a new frontier of understanding how ear function affects the reception of sound into the brain to cause specific patterns of human behavior, both normal and abnormal. I am also among those finding harmless treatments for mental illnesses. The success other people have reported to me about applying Focused Listening™ to their schizophrenia, bipolarity, depression, dyslexic syndrome, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses supports my discovery that the strength of the right ear is fundamental to mental, physical, and spiritual health.
Laurna Tallman