TOMATIS Intensive for Adults

Attention

Attention is the capacity to select and maintain awareness of an exterior event or a thought. It corresponds to the general waking state and to vigilance, which lets the nervous system be receptive to any form of information that comes to mind. Attention disorders affect adults who cannot sufficiently concentrate on work to be done over long periods, even if this work requires only a minimum of intellectual effort or has a routine or familiar character to it (such as revising or recopying). A specific modality of attention is the capacity to divide one’s attention among several sources of information or tasks to be done. A deficiency in this attentional modality is not only very costly in a cognitive sense, but is also a source of difficulty and even considerable suffering for a child in a school setting.

Beyond its general action of cerebral stimulation (i.e., cortical charging), the Tomatis Method can also have a very positive action on selective attention. In effect, the Tomatis procedure is based on the electronic gating that brings about a perceptual sound contrast meant to constantly surprise the brain so that it stays awake and attentive The goal is to help the brain develop automatic mechanisms for detecting changes, which will consequently reinforce selective attention. 
 

Learning Another Language

During development, a child has to learn to select the sound elements that are compatible with its linguistic environment, and at the same time ignore those elements that are absent from the phonetic structures that it perceives in its usual surroundings. The child will acquire a linguistic coding by adjusting to the sound structures of its own language. But, for an adult, because this coding is specific to each language, it will rapidly become a brake on the learning of a foreign language, insofar as the sounds of the foreign language do not conform to the sound patterns of its native language. A language is therefore first of all a kind of music, that is, an ensemble of specific rhythms and sounds. These rhythms and sounds constitute the fundamental sound substrate on which all other acquisitions will be based (for example, lexical, syntactical, and semantic acquisitions).

The goal of the Tomatis Method is to give to anyone wishing to learn a foreign language the possibility of truly appropriating these rhythms and sounds by allowing the ear to adapt itself effectively to this foreign music, so that it may analyze and reproduce it. This requires that students free themselves from the usual rhythmic and sonorous habits of their native language, habits that often have a negative influence on learning a new language. 

 

Musicality 

One of the historical areas of application for the Tomatis Method concerns the improvement of musicality and of the speaking or singing voice. 

 

Thanks to its direct action on the cerebral mechanisms that link perception and action, the fundamental principle of the Tomatis Method is that any modification of the mechanisms concerning the reception and analysis of a sound message will have consequences on the reproduction of that message, be it spoken, sung, or mediated by a musical instrument.  Good quality vocalization does require a well-tuned listening of an external sound message, but also a well-tuned self-listening.  That is, a well-honed capacity to use one’s own voice as a sound source to be analyzed and properly controlled in intensity and quality. This self-listening happens only when the perceived sound vibration is correctly regulated by bone conduction, which is the path of transmission for sound through all of the body’s bones, and in particular, the cranium.