What Is Dyslexic Syndrome?

“Daniel, sit up! Didn’t you hear me? Your glass of milk is about to spill. Wait! Don’t set it down on the edge of the napkin, that won’t be safe, either.” Later, I would blame myself for having made dinnertime unpleasant. Of course, Daniel could hear. He could hear a pin drop three rooms away! That did not mean I could get his attention the way I could get the attention of his brothers and sisters—or that he could respond the way they did when it came to tasks like cleaning up his room. I tested his hearing myself, then had it tested again through the school. “Nothing is wrong with his hearing,” we were told. He wasn’t a “bad” child; he was affectionate, expressive, humorous, especially kind to the pets, intelligent with a prodigious memory, and he tried very hard.

I recognized other “dyslexic syndrome” behavior long before he began school: his confusing of letters, lack of interest in learning to read—although he loved to be read to—and his awkward motor control. At school, the classic symptoms of dyslexia appeared on schedule. Tests with exceptional highs and lows; supported learning; problems with a few teachers but never with his friends; compensatory behaviors; counselling; meetings; intensive reading one-on-one; growing frustration; growing confusion. Why? How are we failing? Does anyone have any idea how to fix this? We learned, when Daniel was 16, that Alfred Tomatis did.

Tomatis noticed that the behavior of his patients changed after the listened to filtered, amplified, high-frequency music. He began his career treating ears with specific frequencies of sound to correct professional singers’ voices. He saw that singers with the best voices are right-lateralized. He used filtered music to “retrain” that “right, leading ear.” He thought the resulting changes in the singers’ posture, self-confidence, and energy were “psychological” side effects, which was a mistake. His pivotal scientific discovery: the voice (larynx) can produce only the frequencies (harmonics) likely to be heard by the ear. The right ear controls the voice: “We sing with our ears.” Then, Tomatis noticed that his techniques applied to spoken language problems: to those who lisped or stuttered or garbled words or felt often at a loss for words. The other problems that characterize dyslexia soon caught his attention because “retraining” the ear affects behavior that may seem remote from the voice. Extremes of behavior became his next frontier. He thought infantile schizophrenia also is related to the “listening” ability of the ear. He proved that sound stimulation changed the extreme behavior of autistic children, but he adapted his own discoveries to his psychiatrist colleagues’ unscientific notion that schizophrenia is caused by the mother. That’s when his collaborator, Guy Bérard, quit, earned his otolaryngology specialty, and set up his own practice.

When Daniel’s alternating cerebral dominance became clear to me, my feelings of parental inadequacy subsided. I had found the piece of the puzzle Tomatis had been missing in the “flip-flopping” lateralization he dismissed. Some people are physiologically incapable of normal behavior. The Tallman Paradigm explains why. Their problems are not “psychological” but derive from a tiny muscle in the right ear. Best of all, they can be treated with Focused Listening to restore, or to establish, their left-brain dominance.