8.2 The Six Elements of Ear and Brain Performance.

What are the six elements of ear brain performance?

mouse over the segments to learn about each element

SOUND RECEPTION - Hearing
For sound to be perceived accurately requires the healthy functioning of several parts of the ear. The middle ear has bones and muscles for vibration and tuning. The inner ear has tiny receptor cells which resonate to different frequencies.
Sound Therapy introduces complex tones and high frequency rich sounds (in the region of 16 to 20KHz) which encourages the brain to improve the ear’s responsiveness.
While a hearing aid will make sound louder, only Sound Therapy can actually improve the way we process sound. It is often used successfully in combination with hearing aids.

EMOTIONAL BALANCE — Happiness
Music affects our moods through rhythm, melody and harmony. Sound Therapy has great complexity in these three areas, leading to the engagement of various brain centres.
Stimulation of certain centres in the left pre-frontal cortex has been shown through EEGs to lift the mood, causing feelings of peace, serenity and optimism. Regular Sound Therapy has been found to help resolve emotional memories linked to early auditory experience in the womb or childhood.
As the neural pathways are opened to higher frequencies and better sound processing, emotional trauma associated with old models of auditory processing can be released.

AUDITORY MAPPING — Sound perception
Auditory mapping is the patterns we learn to recognize through repeated firing of certain groups of neurons in our auditory cortex.
Ear damage, brain injury or head injury can lead to hearing distortions which may result in confused sound perception or tinnitus (ringing/noise in the ears).
This means the auditory maps are faulty and the brain is not accurately perceiving sound. Sound Therapy causes neural firing in complex patterns which engage many different sensory and perceptive areas such as the auditory cortex, hypothalamus, and limbic system. This introduces change, enabling the auditory mapping to become more accurate and useful.

LEARNING — Auditory processing
To learn we must be able to efficiently process words and letters, whether through writing, speaking or thinking.
Left ear dominance leads to confusion, as sounds first go the right hemisphere and then have to cross over to the left hemisphere to reach the main language processing area. This fractional delay can cause dyslexia (word reversals) or stuttering.
If the speed of auditory processing is slow, children (or adults) will have trouble keeping up with language. Sound Therapy improves right ear dominance and opens the perception to high frequencies, increasing the speed and accuracy of language abilities.

BALANCE — Spatial awareness
Our balance depends on our perception of the movement or angle of the head.
The fluid in the inner ear chambers is affected by muscle spasms or blockages in the ear.
Rehabilitation of the muscles of the middle ear and Eustachian tube, along with remapping of the perceptual pathways can assist to relieve certain forms of ear related dizziness and vertigo.

BRAIN ENERGY — Focus
The brain is recharged by sound. Dr Tomatis (the ear doctor who first developed Sound Therapy) said the brain needs 3 billion stimuli per second for four and a half hours per day in order to function at maximum potential. High frequency sound is the most efficient type of sensory input to stimulate the brain because sound is registered at all three levels of the brain – the brain stem, mid brain and cortex. Use Sound Therapy during study or creative work to optimize your brain’s performance.