“The Brain’s Way of Healing”

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“The Brain’s Way of Healing”, a new book by Norman Doidge

Will the French rediscover the principles of Alfred Tomatis via the North American continent?

Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and researcher at Columbia University in New York, where he also teaches. Columnist for the Canadian newspaper “The National Post”, he shares his time between Toronto and New York.

In his previous bestseller “The Brain that Changes Itself”, praised by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of “Musicophilia”, Doidge brought to the public a series of studies and research exemplifying the most important change in our understanding of the brain since the beginning of modern science, namely brain plasticity.

For centuries it was believed that the price we paid for our brain’s complexity was that it could not regenerate. That it was unable to recover mental abilities lost because of damage or disease.

Today, with his book “The Brain’s Way of Healing”, Doidge reverses this belief when he explains how the brain’s capacities are highly dynamic. How its very  sophistication makes possible a unique and gentle kind of healing.

In his book’s last chapter, he introduces the works of Alfred Tomatis, building on the experience of psychologist and Tomatis practitioner Paul Madaule, who has been running a “Listening Center” in Toronto, Canada for several years.

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Neural circuits underlying mother’s voice perception predict social communication abilities in children

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Children’s brains are more activated by hearing their mother’s voice, compared to hearing another female voice, even when the words lack any meaning. The activated brain regions go beyond just the auditory areas (primary auditory cortex), also including the areas responsible for emotions (amygdala), reward processing (mesolimbic reward pathway and medial prefrontal cortex), social functions, facial recognition and detection

of what is personally relevant. The study, done by the Stanford School of Medicine, found that the strength of connections between those areas can predict that child’s social communication abilities. This preference for the mother’s voice, which can quickly activate multiple brain regions, was already seen in a previous study where

1-day-old babies sucked harder on their pacifiers when hearing their mother’s voice, as opposed to the voice of another woman. These results provide insights into communication problems in children with autism, which the researchers plan to investigate next.

 

References:

Daniel A. Abrams, Tianwen Chen, Paola Odriozola, Katherine M. Cheng,

Amanda E. Baker, Aarthi Padmanabhan, Srikanth Ryali, John Kochalka,

Carl Feinstein, and Vinod Menon. Neural circuits underlying mother’s

voice perception predict social communication abilities in children.

PNAS, May 2016 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1602948113

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Tomatis Effect – from Ear to Voice and Color

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Tomatis Effect – from Ear to Voice and Color

The international training centre Mozart-Brain-Lab (MBL), together with the Atlantis Institute and the Italian researcher Carmela Stillitano, have published the following scientific article called: “Tomatis Effect: From Ear to Voice and Colour”.

The Study has shown that the voice of a brazilian actress has significantly improved after a 14-days intensive therapy using the Brain Activator, developed by the Mozart-Brain-Lab.

The listening tests taken before, during and after the two weeks’ treatment, as well as the analysis of the subject’s voice recorded before and after the therapy, have shown significant changes that only the therapy could explain.

The CD included with the article printout, gives the reader the opportunity to compare recordings before and after.

Carmela Stillitano gives in her work evidence of the increase of energy in the frequency ranges of formant 2 and 3 that the therapy has facilitated. Since the frequency ranges corresponding to formant 2 and 3 do not affect only the perception of tone but also of color, the researcher could demonstrate in her analysis of the drawings made by the subject during the treatment, that the changes that the treatment with the Brain Activator have brought can be quantified, from not only a vocal and an auditory point of view, but also a visual one. Drawings made during the various phases of the therapy are also included.

The article is intended for singers, speakers, actors or any person who is using their voice at a professional level. It should also be of interest for therapists practicing Audio-Psycho-Phonology (APP) or helpers working in APP centres.

The research study originally written in Italian has been translated in English. It is a four-colour brochure with format Din A 4; including on a CD the samples of the patient’s voice taken during the therapy.