What Is Autism?
Autism used to be called “infantile schizophrenia.” The label was changed to distance children from the stigma attached to adult schizophrenia. However, the essential characteristics are the same: ear muscle weakness so severe that the two halves of the brain cannot integrate. The normal processes of memory; of learning; of the organization of speech; and of co-ordination of eyes, ears, limbs, and body systems are interrupted incessantly at about two-minute intervals as long as the person is awake. My observations of a few autistic adults and of two autistic children confirm my observations of our son Daniel’s schizophrenic, alternating cerebral influences on his behaviour and on theirs. Two minutes of left-brain influence are followed by two minutes of right-brain influence. My reading of the literature by and about autistics and my communication online with high-performing autistics confirm my observations of adult schizophrenia.
The difference between schizophrenics and autistics is that the schizophrenic had normal or close-to-normal learning experiences until the onset of schizophrenia during his or her teens or twenties, whereas the autistic has been deprived of normal learning experiences from very early childhood and has no memory of how “normal” feels.
The interruption of normal learning does not mean that no learning takes place. The sensory organs of the body convey data to the brain just as for anyone with eyes, ears, nose, a sense of touch, and so on. The person experiences reality. However, those experiences are shaped relatively little by a rational left-brain. In fact, the left-brain has had little opportunity to develop rationality. For people with normal right-ear function, the left-brain, while awake, is constantly shaping those holistic, right-brain experiences. For people with weak right-ear function, the irrational, amoral, intensely emotional association between primal urges and raw data experience by the right-brain exert extraordinary influence on behaviour. The storage of experience in the right-brain’s nerves, which the left-brain normally retrieves with the logic in grammatical language that produces reasoning (including self-control) about that experience, is not sorted, categorized, or repressed by the autistic left-brain. The autistic right-brain with its total visual, auditory, olfactory (smell), kinesthetic (motion), interior sense of body movements (proprioception), and other sensory experience is hugely present to awareness.
For those taking care of the infant, the absence of normal left-brain learning processes makes teaching extremely challenging. Autistics’ very poor left-brain dominance and use of left-brain language and logic lead not only to uncontrolled behaviour but to “savant” and “synesthesia” thought processes. The savant has extraordinary access to experience, i.e., to memory stores in the right-brain, even while incoming experience in the present is creating memories. The savant lacks the categorizing ability that normally separates sensory data. In the synesthete’s awareness (and not all synesthetes are autistic) the sensory data “overlap” so they are recalled by the left-brain simultaneously instead of sequentially. Days of the week, letters, numbers, colors, and other primary modes of perception are overlayered. Remember, the right ear is a timing mechanism because it perceives sound frequencies, which are defined as a source of energy per second. An ear that cannot distinguish certain frequencies deprives the left-brain of the sound energy needed to recover and organize data from the right-brain. Such a synthesis of data from different senses makes communication with normal others difficult. We see the same “inability to establish borders” in lesser ear-muscle weakness syndromes, from dyslexia and bipolarity to schizophrenia.
Daniel Tammet’s autobiography Born on a Blue Day demonstrates how the ear weakness he was born with deteriorated during childhood illness to move him from a dyslexic’s level of poorly shaped sensory experiences into the autistic’s level of unshaped sensory experiences. Tammet’s writing is informative about the genetic factors in ear function he inherited and about his mindsets, including gender identification, that were inevitable from the way he experienced reality through a right ear (at least) that did not function normally. Of course, Tammet and those in his circle and those in the wide world do not realize his exceptional experiences, thinking, and behaviour were the consequences of a muscle weakness in his right (and possibly also left) ear.
As the ear normally controls the timing of many body systems, those processes are greatly disrupted in autistics. The result is not only abnormal intellectual development but body systems that don’t run normally and are out of synch with one another. Among the results are poor balance, therefore, slowness to walk and to manipulate objects or otherwise learn control of the limbs; slowness to talk or otherwise learn to communicate; low emotional controls, therefore, raw primal urges displayed constantly; poor co-ordination of the eyes, therefore, hallucinations and delusions; poor respiration, therefore, asthma; poor enzyme production, therefore, inadequately digested food, diarrhea, and other digestive upsets; cardiovascular dysfunction, therefore, dysrhythmias and fatigue; reduced hormonal production, therefore, an array of “allergic” reactions to factors in the air and in foods, to activity and stresses, to sounds, to smells, to persons and to other animals encountered, and to everything else in the child’s environment.
Tomatis and Bérard and practitioners using their music therapies have had some success in treating autistic children. In my opinion, their treatments are much too brief to develop sufficient strength in the ear muscles to achieve normal left-brain dominance. An exception is Sharon Ruben, who turned the Tomatis Method into a daily therapy for her daughter, which she describes in Awakening Ashley. Binaural methods based on the Tomatis Methodreinforce undesired left-ear dominance while strengthening right-ear dominance. Focused Listening would be the preferred treatment for establishing the right-ear dominance that leads to left-brain dominance and a brain that integrates normally. I have not yet had the opportunity to see an autistic person try Focused Listening properly, although I saw an autistic child respond very quickly with improved left-brain dominance during a few minutes of binaural listening to high-frequency music.
I have interacted online with some high-functioning autistics and I have talked to parents of autistic children and adults. I have read several books that describe the authors’ experiences as autistics or as parents of autistics. Tomatis had some success treating autistic children, although in my opinion his theoretical stance was askew. Bérard claimed to heal only one autistic: Georgiana Stehli, whose mother wrote about that healing and then edited two collections of parents’ stories about partial success treating their autistic children using Bérard’s AIT.
The Tallman Paradigm explains the learning difficulties and physical ailments of autistics as schizophrenic children—the old-fashioned term relevant to our understanding of their abnormal experiences and behaviour. It seems likely that the longitudinal, right-eared technique of Focused Listening that cured Daniel Tallman’s schizophrenia is applicable to autistics.
Bérard’s warning not to use his Audio Integration Training (AIT) for schizophrenics probably is related to AIT music therapy that very strongly stimulates the left ear as well as the right ear. His method was less successful for autistic children, no doubt for the same reason. Tomatis’s less emphatic treatment of the left-ear in his binaural method probably explains why he had greater success with autism. However, the limited claims of Paul Madaule for the healing of autistics by the Tomatis Method, as recounted by Norman Doidge in The Brain’s Way of Healing, chapter 8, possibly are the result of left-ear stimulation that compromises the needed focus on the right ear.