Tallman Paradigm Focused Listening™ with Auracles

Tallman Paradigm Focused Listening™ with Auracles

Post 1 The Origins of Laurna Tallman’s TPFL™ and Auracles

My simple, innovative music therapy healed a person diagnosed with schizophrenia who had been ill for 10 years. When that healing deteriorated two years later, following a hit of LSD, the same right-eared music therapy healed the person again. The research that I, Laurna Tallman, had been doing all of my adult life into the causes of human behavior took on a specific purpose as I sought to understand some of the symptoms of schizophrenia that I had observed but that did not appear in the literature. I had devised simple tests of the person’s attention deficit that added to my inventory of symptoms of schizophrenia. From my reading of psychiatry textbooks, books by other specialists, and the exceptional resources of the Internet, I found no reports of deliberate healings of schizophrenia, and I found no scientific understanding of the causes of mental illnesses whatsoever. I did see vast amounts of speculative commentary in quantities of research in psychiatry and in related fields, including in my own specialties in education methods and learning problems.

I followed many academic threads in my research, including medical information no longer available online to the general public. I learned about recent and less recent discoveries in neurology that had a bearing on my own novel observations. As I watched my music therapy, now called Focused Listening™, gradually make my subject more rational, I analyzed his changing speech patterns. I noticed that he was passing through several clearly defined mental illnesses. Language, as well as literature, was my academic specialty. Learning about V.S. Ramachandran’s delineation of the characteristics specialized to each cerebral hemisphere, I could see that my Focused Listening™ music therapy was making the schizophrenic man “more left-brained.” Almost simultaneously, I grasped that without losing his right-brain characteristics his left-brain increasingly was dominating the integrative process that creates spoken language and the mental processes we call “learning” and “thought” and “consciousness.” A cascade of other understandings about consciousness, learning, and behavior patterns flowed from that pivotal awareness of right-ear-driven left-brain dominance in cerebral integration that I named “the Tallman Neurological Paradigm™.” About 10 months’ application of Focused Listening™ (he had quit for a month during the summer) and following the withdrawal of his minuscule dose of medication, restored full left-brained dominance and behavior within the range of normal, excepting his substance addictions.

Despite those addictions, over which he was gaining control, he remained left-brain dominant for the next 10 years. He traveled, pursued various interests with focus and consistent work, shared an apartment with friends in Montreal. Then, an unwarranted assault by police triggered slow-developing PTSD with intermittent psychosis. He returned to his parents’ home. While the COVID-19 pandemic upended the world, he withdrew socially, He refused to use Focused Listening™, Without mentoring and using primarily ambient sound, and finally a few days of Focused Listening™, he recovered to his former condition of normal left-brain dominance despite his remaining addiction to cannabis.

My further research revealed an important anatomical observation of the noted French otolaryngologist Alfred Tomatis: that the neural connections from each ear to both halves of the brain are distributed bilaterally but unequally. The right ear has more connections to the left-brain and the left ear has more connections to the right-brain. Further exploration into Tomatis’s research revealed that the higher frequencies of sound are processed through the ear canal into the middle ear, while the lower frequencies of sound penetrate to the inner ear mainly through bone conduction. (Another middle ear muscle, the tensor tympanum, is a fail-safe mechanism for moving the maleus or hammer off the eardrum to reduce the volume of low-frequency sound into the ear canal.) Inside the middle ear, the muscle attached to the third bone of hearing (stapes or stirrup) is pivotal to that bone’s action against the oval window. The stapedius muscle is somewhat like a hinge on a gate. To be responsive, it must be “toned” or “tonic.” Only then can it be reactive to nerve impulses coming from the facial nerve (the seventh cranial nerve) and to the frequencies of sound that vibrate the little stirrup it is attached to. Since the muscle is anchored at its other end to a tiny “pyramid” on the wall of the tympanic cavity, low-frequency vibrations of that wall have a mitigating effect on how the stapedius muscle can respond to the high-frequencies it gates into the inner ear. Loud, low-frequency sound is hazardous to the hearing mechanism.

I saw, perhaps more fully than Tomatis, that this smallest of structural muscles is the pivot for the hearing mechanism. Its responsiveness to nerve impulses and to incoming sound vibrations determines how successfully the sound frequencies traversing the middle ear bones (ossicles) will reach the inner ear, the brain, and the entire nervous system. Also, the nervous system activates muscles. Tomatis saw the ear as the hub for feedback from its sound-dispersing function in what he called a “cybernetic” response, which also requires a toned stapedius muscle. I had learned that the right half of that bilateral system must dominate for the person to be rational. However, the left half of that system must be fully functional for the right-brain to have normally optimistic moods.

Muscle can be injured. Muscle can be exercised back into fitness. Very simply, a weak or damaged stapedius muscle will deprive the brain of the higher frequencies of sound, which contain the greatest amount of energy. In other words, so-called “mental illnesses” and learning problems and post-viral conditions like long-COVID and possibly many other illnesses are caused by ear-related, sound-deprivation to the brain, and to other parts of the body. After 15 years of counselling and mentoring people who tried Focused Listening™ for a wide range of conditions, I dubbed my easily modified headphones “the auracle.” This blog is dedicated to those who want to try Focused Listening™ with their own auracles and share their experiences with other readers.