Because psychiatry does not understand what causes any mental illness, psychiatry spends a great deal of time and energy on labels for symptom clusters and on theories. Psychiatrists succeed in fastening labels on behavior only because mental illness forms a continuous spectrum, a fact that they have not yet recognized. Mental illnesses interrupt normal learning processes. In the literature on schizophrenia I read at the time of our son’s diagnosis in 1997, the consensus opinion was that schizophrenics cannot learn. But I saw that he was learning in social ways, although he was not capable of studying ordinary school subjects in organized lessons because he could not pay attention consistently. His memory appeared to switch on and off every couple of minutes.

Alfred Tomatis’s Principle of Right-Ear Dominance for Singers

The French otolaryngologist Alfred Tomatis learned experimentally that a singer without a dominant right ear could not sing correctly on pitch. He used a binaural (both ears) music therapy that used symphonic violin music electronically filtered to remove the low frequencies from the sound. His method turned out to be successful not only for singers but for young people with dyslexic syndrome. He had partial or unpredictable success with some other behaviour conditions. His theorizing about the effect of sound in the ear and brain is somewhat contradictory. My son and I were treated with the Tomatis Method with astonishing success. However, the psychology clinic staff did not know why the treatment sometimes worked and sometimes was unsuccessful. About a week later, my son lost his healing and slipped into his first sustained psychotic break. It very well may have been sustained by the medications he was given in hospital. In any case, I was naive about medical responses to psychosis, apart from some books and films I’d seen. My journey of enlightenment had begun.

The Tallman Neurological Paradigm of Left-Brain Dominance

I lost my healing two year later and found a solution with ordinary headphones and CDs of violin music that I played on my computer. Ten years later, when our son reached out for music in my headphones, I recalled that Tomatis had thought the right ear was more important. I quickly devised a method for him to use my headphones but with the left channel blocked. He listened every day for 1 to 2 hours. A little over four weeks later, he lost his schizophrenia symptoms during a single afternoon. He remained sane for two years until he got some LSD. When he told me he was becoming psychotic again, I reinstated the minuscule dosage of a psychiatric drug that had seemed to stabilize him during his early years of schizophrenia. It made him much worse. I was afraid to withdraw it. He began using my right-eared therapy again. After 2-3 weeks, he felt the effects of the LSD had worn off. Or, he may have been adjusting to the level of the medication. In any case, he remained severely psychotic. I had lost all confidence in the psychiatric or medical profession for treating mental illnesses. While our son gradually improved — much slower this time — using Focused Listening™, I undertook to find answers to my own questions about schizophrenia after having observed him and other psychotic individuals for that decade. I succeeded beyond my most hopeful expectations. Piecing together the findings of various other researchers with my own observations, I came to the awareness that Focused Listening™ was making him “more left-brained.” As I took notes on the changes in the grammatical composition of his sentences, I could see that the language centres in his left-brain were becoming better able to organize the information stored in his memory in the right-brain. He was becoming more rational and less emotional. In the same moment when I realized that the left-brain in all of us must dominate the right-brain’s information feed, including emotions, I saw that his ear was pivotal to that process and that the music therapy was making his right ear more normal.

Guy Bérard’s Audiogram Profiles for Depression

The French otolaryngologist Guy Bérard states that perfect hearing shows up on the audiogram as the same threshold of hearing for  all of the frequencies tested: a straight line at, say, 10 decibels. He noticed that the audiograms of his patients with suicidal thoughts and tendencies had a consistent pattern of “peaks” of hyperacusis at 2 kiloHertz and at 8 kiloHertz in the left ear, which also meant the hearing between those points formed a valley of higher thresholds for the frequencies  between 2 and 8 kHz on the audiogram. When some of those patients had the same 2 – 8 pattern on the audiogram for the right ear, their depression was more severe. When patients had that pattern only in the right ear their depression was less severe. Such a valley on the audiogram indicates a relative loss of hearing at those frequencies between 2 and 8 kHz. Losses of hearing are losses of sound energy that the brain needs in order to function normally.

Bérard’s findings are consistent with what I later learned about the need of each half of the brain for consistent flows of sound energy in proportions that cause left-brain dominance. Although Focused Listening™ is with the right ear and most nerves into the brain from the right ear connect to the left-brain, a smaller proportion of nerves from the right ear run to the right-brain. The Focused Listening™ our son did reinforced mainly those pathways from right ear to left-brain. As his right stapedius muscle became stronger, it could transfer high-frequency sound in his surroundings into his left-brain without the help of headphones’ amplification. Our son’s behaviour, including his ability to learn, became normal when Focused Listening™ had reinforced those nerve paths to the left-brain to the point where they carried enough sound energy to ensure its dominance as it integrated with the right-brain. That unequal split of sound transfer from the right ear to each half of the brain is mirrored y the left ear. For other neurological reasons, the left-brain language centres use right-ear sound first, both for hearing and for the response of speaking. That unequal timing in the distribution of sound energy ensures left-brain dominance in the integrative processes of the two halves of the brain.

Bérard’s music therapy leveled those peculiar peaks and raised the valley. By doing so, his patients’ received a greater volume of high-frequency sound into their ears, most significantly in the right, emotional brain, so that their suicidal depression resolved in over 97 per cent of the 235 cases he treated. Bérard did not realize that the ear mechanism itself was being altered by this music therapy to bring about the desired effect. The stapedius muscle was becoming stronger. Within a couple of weeks, in most cases, it was strong enough to aid in the transfer of greater volumes of the higher frequencies of sound into the ear. In other words, his binaural music therapy ensured that the patient would be receiving more sound energy into both sides of the brain long after the therapy was finished. In fact, an environment rich in high-frequency music would ensure the ongoing fitness of the stapedius muscle. As long as the emotional right-brain was getting enough sound energy to experience positive mood, any imbalance in hemispheric dominance may have been less important or, perhaps, was being corrected as well.

Furthermore, he saw that patients with mild or moderate depression also had characteristic audiogram patterns. Those with mild depression had peaks of hyperacusis at 1 and 8 kHz. Those with moderate depression had peaks at 1.5 and 8 kHz. His binaural music therapy cured them, too. In regard to the emotional right-brain, it appears that any therapy that strengthens both stapedius muscles improves the volume of high-frequency sound to the right half of the brain, which cures the patient’s depression. Bérard’s success suggests that most people with depression (but not manic-depression) benefit from a binaural listening program. In such cases, Focused Listening™ may not be the best approach for healing. At least, comparative research needs to be done.

Guy Bérard’s Audiogram Profiles for Dyslexia and a Case of Autism

Unfortunately, my learning about audiogram patterns from Bérard came after my first discoveries about left-brain dominance. Our son never had an audiogram and I have not been able to obtain audiograms from many of the people I have counselled. This aspect of emerging science is one I hope to learn more about. However, Bérard’s understanding of “binaural distortions” provides an important clue that supports my findings about right-ear-driven left-brain dominance.

Improving the flow of sound energy to the left-half of our schizophrenic son’s brain caused him to change his behaviour patterns through a series of mental illnesses in a particular order. At the same time, the artwork he made indicated a growing integration in his self-concept. Learning forms a continuous spectrum, too. We call that combination of schoolwork and social learning from infancy to the late teens or early 20s “maturation.”

When a person is labeled as “mentally ill” it’s because that maturation process cannot proceed — as in autism or childhood depression or childhood bipolarity — or because something has happened to erode the person’s maturation, such as schizophrenia or bipolarity or Alzheimer’s disease. Diagnosis in childhood is tricky because even a normal child is not fully secure in left-brain dominance for coping with everything life can present. Many kids with normal ears and brain function are traumatized by horrible events that overwhelm them and they form a special category of problem behavior parallel to ear-driven mental illness with similar symptoms, even to the point of schizophrenia. Tomatis thought all behavior problems were a matter of a child “shutting off listening.” Of course, social “events” like war can do the same thing to an adult. I learned that Tomatis was not “opening” the non-listening ear in that sense when he treated autism, dyslexia, and other conditions. He was strengthening an ear that for some reason has a weak stapedius muscle.

What psychiatry does not realize is that mental stability and maturation are controlled by the same ear mechanism that increases left-brain dominance, which is the normal condition for the integrative activities of the brain.

 Left-brain dominance is driven by two aspects of ear function: (1) the ability of the right ear to maintain left-brain dominance over the right-brain in their integrative processes and (2) the ability of the left ear to maintain a similar supply of energy to the right-brain for its sensory data storage and for its emotional work. Both ears normally process high-frequency sound in the environment through the middle ear (a) into inner ear and brain and (b) into the vagus network. Not just the brain but the functioning of the whole body depends on the ears having a good supply of high-frequency sound in the environment and on the ears having strong middle ear muscles, especially the stapedius, to convey that sound energy into the brain and body.

Sound deprivation and/or distortion by the left ear to the right-brain cause depression: mild, moderate, or suicidal. The French otolaryngologist Guy Bérard identified the audio deficits in the left ear that cause the range of depression (although I have identified another more severe in that range). The range of audio deficits in the right ear that cause the range of left-brain losses of dominance has not been defined yet. (I’m working on it!) There is no doubt that left-brain losses are caused by the right ear because my innovative therapy that cures them is directed only to the right ear. This sequence of mental illnesses, from most severe to least severe, that Focused Listening music therapy has healed is: schizophrenia, bipolar I, bipolar II, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and dyslexic syndrome.

Psychiatry merely drugs most of these conditions. However, for anyone with enough left-brain dominance to speak coherently, psychiatrists historically tried to talk such people out of their illness or they questioned them in an effort to find personal or cultural “reasons” for their aberrant behavior. They use those “reasons” (none of which have been established scientifically) to describe the behavior. Thus, “Depersonalization-derealization disorder is thought to be caused largely by interpersonal trauma such as childhood abuse. . . . Triggers may include significant stress, panic attacks, and drug use.” Actually, that loss of sense of self is caused by a slowing of the integration of the cerebral hemispheres and anyone can feel that way while falling asleep, which is when integration slows in everyone. I have known perfectly sane people who described “feeling disconnected or detached from one’s self.” Individuals experiencing depersonalization may report feeling as if they are an outside observer of their own thoughts or body, and often report feeling a loss of control over their thoughts or actions.” (Wikipedia) The same thing can happen to a person in physical pain or with an infection. In fact, people who have trouble maintaining their left-brain dominance at any time also may have a lower pain threshold. Furthermore, “stress” means a situation that causes greater emotion, a right-brain phenomenon that heightens the demands on the left-brain to regain or to maintain dominance. A “panic attack” is not a “trigger” but a description of a further loss of left-brain dominance for some reason. A person who is stuck continually in that state of consciousness does not have the tonus (strength and flexibility) in the middle ear stapedius muscle to adjust greater tension on the muscle, which would bring more high-frequency sound into the brain, especially the left-brain, to offset the turbulence in the right-brain.

Can this level of poor integration turn into something worse? Yes, if the ear is subjected to some kind of assault that affects the stapedius muscle, the symptoms can worsen so that the person becomes more isolating, more out-of-touch with others, and more dys-integrated. So-called “split personality” (dissociative identity disorder) is one such possibility. Antisocial personality disorder is another:
“Antisocial personality disorder is defined by a pervasive and persistent disregard for morals, social norms, and the rights and feelings of others. ”

Again, if you look at Ramachandran’s categories (to which I have made some additions) you will see that more tendencies of the right-brain are involved in that condition. Drugs, including psychiatric drugs, harm the ears (as well as other body parts), which worsens these conditions.