Sounds that energize the brain
“Some sounds are just as good as a couple of cups of coffee,” says Alfred Tomatis, an outstanding French hearing expert.
This means that we can use music as a tonic.
Since the time when humankind first created music, it served its everyday goals. Lullabies, military, sea songs – the list is as long as history and culture.
Today, high-tech Tomatis has discovered a high-tech method for uncovering the inner power of sound, a force that actually possesses “super power” for enhancing mental abilities, healing, and energizing energy.
According to Tomatis, “sound can be an extraordinary source of energy.” Today, at seventy years old, he is still energetic, it is enough for him to sleep three to four hours a day, because when he works, special music sounds as background. But Tomatis did not close only on the tonic music.
For several decades, he carried out special measurements using sophisticated equipment to find out how different sound frequencies affect a person: which ones supply him with energy and which ones take it away from him.
And how does this happen? He came to a startling discovery. “The ear is not meant only to hear,” declared Tomatis, “the ear is meant to energize the mind and body.”
Do you get energy through your ears? When Tomatis experimented with the music of Bach, Mozart, the Gregorian compositions, the testimony of his scientific instruments stated that fatigue, fatigue and weakening as a result of stress occur when the gray cells of your brain receive insufficient electrical energy. In other words, they lack strength.
Tomatis claims that these cells work like little electric batteries. They produce electricity in your brain, supplying them to the brain waves that are recorded by the EEG. You may think that these small batteries are charged by the metabolism of the body. Not quite, says Tomatis. And just this is his main achievement.
Your battery cells are charged with something from the outside, and this is something there is sound, in particular high-frequency sound. The cells of the dagger are engaged in the transformation of energy coming from the outside. If you were traveling in your inner ear, then after wandering through the intricate labyrinths of the cochlea, you suddenly come to the “line of dagger”, the longest line of the most accurate dancers in the whole world.
Arranged in rows, 24,600 oblong cells dance in exact correspondence with each sound, like a corps de ballet in the Radio City music hall.
The energy produced as a result of this unusual dance flows into your brain, and its part is separated to get through the vestibular branch of the cerebellum to the muscles of your body.
High-frequency sounds energize your brain, while at the same time relieving muscle tension and producing different balancing of your body. They affect you even after you listened to them. Some of these high-frequency, energy-filled sounds are also used in Super Learning music.
But you are not getting energy just by listening to high frequency sounds. It is this Tomatis discovery that explains why some North Americans do not receive a charge of vitality while listening to baroque music, as the people of Eastern Europe do. There is something else that goes along with the rumor, caused mainly by the pollution of the sound – because Eastern Europeans are used to a different sound background.
Also Tomatis found out that you get used to listening within the sound spectrum of your native language. As a result, people perceive music in completely different ways. The range of auditions in Slavic languages includes both very low and very high frequencies. The area of American English is much narrower.
You come to this world with the ability to perceive a wide range of sounds, with the ability to perceive sounds with a frequency of 16 Hz to 20 000 Hz. Then age, sometimes ear infections, and almost always sound pollution impair perception. Jackhammer noise with its frequency of 3500 beats per minute, traffic, sirens, subway, screaming music, knocking mechanisms – all this reduces the range of hearing.
According to Tomatis, one of the reasons why we begin to feel worse with age is that we cannot hear high-frequency sounds that can recharge us.
Dr. David Lipscomb from the sound lab at the University of Tennessee in 1982 reported that 60% of those entering the university have significant hearing impairment in the high-frequency domain. Their hearing could only be compared with the hearing of an elderly person. “These young people begin their working lives with the ears of old people,” said Lipscomb.
Can “aged” ears become young again? And again, Dr. Tomatis is the savior. He determined that you can update your ears using sounds. It seems a paradox – to restore hearing with the help of hearing.
