Tag Archives: brain

What the Heck is Sound Training?

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Sound Training can help address your child’s skills and abilities that you’d most like to see improved, from gifted development to specific learning challenges. How can something you listen to help learning challenges? Let me explain:

As Dr. Alfred Tomatis, the “Father” of Sound Training, discovered that 85 percent of the neural pathways to our brain are stimulated through the ear. Within the ear, there are two main nerves: the Auditory (Cochlear) Nerve, which carries hearing information between the inner ear and the brain and the Vestibular Integrator, which controls coordination, balance, and governs body functions.

If you are not processing certain frequencies of sound in an optimal way, it can greatly affect motor skills, balance, appetite, toileting, sleep, language (the voice can only produce what the ear can hear), cognitive abilities, understanding multi-step instructions, magnitude of a situation, the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes, energy, mood, sound sensitivity, transitioning from one activity to another, coping skills, anxiety, social skills, and focus and attention.

Whew! Did you ever imagine all those things were affected by the way you process sound?

In addition to frequency deficits, further complications arise when sound is processed through bone conduction instead of air conduction, which is often prevalent in children with Autism, Sensory Processing issues, ADHD, and Dyslexia.

Ideally, sound should be processed air over bone, where it goes through the middle ear (the “gatekeeper”), gets buffered, filtered, sorted, and served to the brain on a silver platter. Auditory processing through bone conduction means the sound goes in the ear and through bone straight to the nervous system. Unable to separate background noises, it is dense, fast, and loud, frequently causing auditory overload and throwing all the other senses into distress.

EnListen® uses custom-engineered music files to wake up the brain and help put the sensory system back in harmony. It uses a filter and delay, first sending the sound through bone conduction via a special headset and then through the ears the proper way. Eventually that gap is closed, like training a lazy eye, making lasting changes to the brain and could dramatically improve:
•    attention, focus and concentration
•    self-confidence
•    emerging language
•    cognition skills
•    reading and writing
•    comprehension and memory
•    eye contact
•    speech clarity
•    organization
•    body function

Done properly, Sound Training gets the foundation intact and strong (low frequency-body functions) and then not only works on deficits but helps build on strengths and develop your child’s natural gifts.

Would you like to learn more about how EnListen® could help you or your child? Schedule a NO-COST consultation here!

Where Am I? Explaining Proprioception and Autism

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What is it?

Proprioception , meaning “one’s own” and perception, is the sense of the relative position of parts of the body. Unlike the traditional five senses by which we perceive the outside world, proprioception tells you whether your body is moving or sitting still, as well as where your body parts are located in relation to one another.

Children with Autism frequently show signs of proprioceptive dysfunction. Do these sensory seeking behaviors sound like your child?

  • Loves to crash into walls repeatedly
  • Stomps when walking
  • Kicks the chair or hooks feet around chair when sitting
  • Prefers tight or multiple layers of clothing
  • Chews on fingers, pens, Nintendo DS styluses (I have bought many of these!)
  • Asks for and gives tight squeeze bear hugs
  • Bumps and pushes other children

Does your child also have difficulty with:

  • Regulating pressure when writing – writes too dark or light
  • Breaking toys
  • Using too much force, like slamming doors, squeezing objects, or setting them down forcefully
  • Petting animals too hard

Children with poor spatial orientation often walk with an odd gait, are unusually clumsy, and sometimes even lean to one side. Riding a bicycle is something they simply can’t get the hang of. They do not feel their bodies in relation to space, and as a result do not feel grounded or safe.

Gravity

According to Dr. Robert Melillo’s Disconnected Kids, a child can function normally without sight or sound, but will struggle immensely with any degree of proprioceptive dysfunction. We resist gravity using our large muscles and joints. In fact, gravity is such a strong stimulus that life cannot survive very long without it. Scientists have tested the effects of the lack of gravity on the brain, concluding that there is a rapid brain cell degeneration that occurs in outer space. NASA noted that some astronauts actually returned from space missions with sensory processing issues similar to children diagnosed with learning disabilities. That’s powerful.

Here’s another amazing test by scientists at the University of California at Berkley: when rats used their muscles and joints in new ways their brain plasticity increased. When sent into space, these same types of rats showed reverse plasticity and marked degeneration of the brain cells.

Help and Hope

So perhaps this illustrates a direct correlation between a sedentary routine (video games, computer use, television) and the continued struggle with proprioceptive dysfunction. Incorporating an Autism Fitness program into your child’s schedule along with specific sensory exercises designed to strengthen brain function can dramatically improve your child’s sensory processing function.

Melillo’s groundbreaking research and results show a disconnection between the left and right sides of the developing brain hemispheres as the underlying cause of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and other PDDs. He has proven that the brain is not hardwired and can change with the right stimulation for the right amount of time, either with exercises done at home or through the Brain Balance Centers he founded.