Interesting info about how we hear

[Guest guest]

I found an article by Dr. Tomatis (you may have heard of the Tomatis

Method or Listening Therapy) who talks about how we hear and the

differences between being right ear or left ear dominent. He also

talks about how our body processes sounds through our bones. The

full article can be found at the link below--I pulled a couple

pieces from the article and pasted them below as well.

http://www.tomatis.com/English/Articles/Biography.html

Being left ear or right ear dominent:

The discovery that listening is key to learning opened a whole new

area of research. One of the things Tomatis asked himself: would it

make any difference with what ear you listen? Most people think that

our two ears are identical and serve identical purposes. Nothing

could be farther from the truth. Tomatis found that people who are

right ear dominant learn much more easily. As Tomatis has a strong

background in neurology, he readily understood why. The right ear is

connected to the left brain, the place where language is processed.

That is a fast and accurate connection. The left ear, however, is

connected to the right brain, where language cannot be processed. It

has to jump via the corpus callosum to the left brain. This is not

only a slower connection, but it is also a less reliable connection.

In the process, some of the higher frequencies get lost, and these

are key to interpreting language. For example, a " b " and a " p "

only differ in the higher harmonics and someone who is left ear

dominant thus has to guess from the context what was said. That

introduces errors and delays. So, Tomatis modified his Electronic

Ear so that he could train people to become right ear dominant, and

make them better learners.

Hearing with our bodies:

As an ENT, Tomatis knew that we listen not only with our ears, but

also with our bodies. Our bones are particularly good sound

conductors. You can test this yourself, by putting a tuning fork on

the top of your skull. You can hear the sound as if it came through

your ears. If good listening is a prerequisite for good learning, he

reasoned, " I better study both modes of listening: with the ears and

with the bones " . This led him to develop a revolutionary new theory

to explain how sounds enter into the inner-ear:

Sounds that reach the ear are modulated by the middle ear. Some

sounds are amplified, some are muffled into the background. The ear

acts like a " gate-keeper " . This gives us the ability to focus on

what is important.

Sounds that are captured by the bones go directly into the inner-

ear, without passing through the middle ear, the gate keeper. So,

background noise and the voice of the teacher are as loud, making it

impossible to really focus.

To learn well, we have to be able to focus. That is not possible if

we predominantly listen through bone conduction. To restore our

ability to focus (and thus learn), he concluded, we have to

desensitize the bone conduction. Could that be done by applying

gated music directly to the bone? He equipped the Electronic Ear

with a vibrator to be placed on the top of the skull and tested what

effect that had on the way people listened. What he found was that

it desensitized the bone conduction, making that people started to

listen predominantly with their ears. Their behavior problems

alleviated and their performance in school improved.