ADHD
If You Can’t Attend, How Can You Learn?
When you have ADHD, you have difficulty directing and maintaining attention. This can be seen in small children not acknowledging or processing sound. It can also be seen in business people having maintaining their holding attention in a meeting.
How would you feel if you were being constantly bombarded by sound and couldn’t turn it off? More importantly, you can’t filter out what’s important from the background sounds. This is one of the experiences of people with ADHD, and why they often seem distracted or disconnected. Some people react with high energy, trying to keep up with the stimuli while others shut down, because they can’t manage it.
Being able to localize to a sound (establish the source) is a precursor to attention and learning. It’s important to determine whether it’s due a hearing or processing issue. In either case, Tomatis can help.
Tomatis for the ADHD Brain
Hearing is actually a function of stimuli that goes through both the ear and our bones. Typically, this information arrives at essentially the same time. With the Tomatis technique we can make subtle changes so that sound traveling by bone and ear conduction don’t arrive at exactly the same moment. This makes the stimulation surprising every single time to all brains, ADHD brains included.
While Tomatis has well observed benefits for listening skills, that is not our sole goal. The overriding goal is to train the brain’s attention mechanisms for all incoming stimuli. A brain that can attend better will be better prepared to learn.
