A Monograph for Professionals

Hemispheric Integration and the Ears:

A Scientific and Inclusive Paradigm of Human Behaviour

Including the Mild and Severe Forms of Mental Illness

by Laurna Tallman

Schizophrenic and other aberrant behaviours are analyzed in a new paradigm that locates their etiology in stapedius muscle dystonia that causes distortions in audio processing. The author’s observations of vacillating cognition and other symptoms of her son’s schizophrenia are analyzed according to V.S. Ramachandran’s description of the different propensities of the cerebral hemispheres and in reference to Alfred Tomatis’s discovery that the right ear has neurological control of the voice according to its efficient neurology in the communication cybernetic loop. The author defined her son’s schizophrenia as non-dominance between the cerebral hemispheres that creates low-speed integration and alternating (every two minutes) modes of cognition. Normal brain function requires dominance of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere in their integrative activities. His dyslexic syndrome had responded to the Tomatis Method of music stimulation (1997). Two episodes of severe schizophrenia were treated with the author’s innovative technique of Focused Listening, in 2006 and in 2008. The first illness lasted almost 10 years. The second episode lasted less than a year because it was treated from the outset with Focused Listening. Each illness was terminated through the application of gently amplified high-frequency sound to his right ear. This method of Focused Listening is simple and inexpensive: using only the right earpiece of ordinary headphones to listen to violin music for one to two hours per day. Daniel’s recovery (cerebral reintegration) was enhanced by his colouring circular geometric designs (mandalas) and creating spontaneous art. His artwork documents cerebral reintegration equivalent to the maturation process between ages four and fourteen. The process in 2006 that healed a 10-year illness of schizophrenia and the 2008 healing that was initiated at the onset of symptoms showed precisely the same maturational progression during recovery.

Tallman noticed that the behavioural phases her son traversed when developing schizophrenia were the phases he passed through in reverse order during recovery: bipolar I, bipolar II, obsessive-compulsive disorder, mild depression, dyslexia, then the range-of-normal behaviour. Symptom improvement gave way suddenly to fully normal behaviour when his left-brain dominance became consistent. That level of dominance requires a tonic, flexible stapedius muscle that is reactive to his voice and to ambient sound. The tonic stapedius muscle restores volitional control to the ear, the necessary condition for learning behavioural self-control. The “self” being controlled is the right-brain’s volatile merging of primal urges with sensory experience that forms the associations we call “the emotions.” Based on Guy Bérard’s audio profiles for depression and aggression, the author hypothesizes distinctive audio-processing deficits corresponding to her son’s sequential patterns of mental illness that lessened in severity under the progressive strengthening of the stapedius muscle.

The author concludes that in dyslexic and schizophrenic integration disorders Wernicke’s area processes morphemes in sequences perpetually interrupted at two-minute intervals due to stapedius dystonia, not through intrinsic cerebral incapacity. The larynx can produce only the order of sounds and words—as well as frequencies—via Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas that the temporal lobe is likely to receive from a dominant right ear. The author replaces speculative models of schizophrenia and other integration disorders with a paradigm of cerebral non-integration with measurable parameters.

The author explains aberrant and normal states and degrees of consciousness as dependent on stapedius muscle tonicity, which adjusts sound-frequency processing to alter left cerebral dominance, hence, the speed of cerebral integration.

108 pages, 60 pages of text. Softbound 8 1/2″ x 11″ format

four-colour illustrations, diagrams, and 24-page Appendix of Daniel’s art showing maturational changes during recovery

$25.00 plus tax where applicable plus shipping and handling .