"Noise is necessary to us" (SON Magazine no. 38, May 1973)
Ninth interview of the series Alain Gerber × Alfred Tomatis in SON Magazine. In no. 38, May 1973, Tomatis defends a paradoxical thesis: “noise is necessary to us”. Four and a half hours of sound stimulation per day are indispensable to cortical tone; in an anechoic chamber, one rapidly falls into anxiety then madness. Tomatis shows that certain deafnesses are not lesions but muscular self-defence armours that spontaneously atrophy when one leaves the workshops (case observed at the Arsenals), expounds the elective scotoma at 2,000 Hz of an EDF employee who “did not hear” his infernal alternator, and identifies the depressive as the archetype of the one who frenetically closes himself off from sounds through psychic projection: the more he closes himself off, the more he complains of noise.
“SON” Magazine — no. 38 — May 1973
Noise is necessary to us
Alfred A. TOMATIS
Interview gathered by Alain Gerber
Presentation
It has become commonplace to observe that the modern city-dweller is aggressed by noise, commonplace also to recall that these aggressions, by their frequency and intensity, can cause very diverse and sometimes very serious lesions. The journalists have sounded the alarm without mincing words, which is all to the good. But one must also know that the harm is not without remedy and that there exist counters to these repeated attacks of the environment.
Sometimes reversible lesions
“It is generally said,” Professor Alfred Tomatis explains, “that the lesions are irremediable, irreversible. There is a judgement that perhaps deserves some qualification. No doubt, it is absolutely impossible to rebuild the auditory nerve if it has been destroyed: one does not yet know how to fabricate the elements of the nervous system.”
“However, I noticed something when I was working at the Arsenals. For various reasons, we had taken the habit of examining people every six months. Some continued to come and see me thus twice a year, even after their retirement. This was an extraordinary chance for me, for it allowed me to observe that some persons struck with supposedly irreversible lesions began again to hear.”
“I immediately conducted a meticulous investigation to try to understand this phenomenon. I did not rule out any hypothesis. I wondered for example whether they had not absorbed more vitamins than others or had not lived in a greater hygiene since their retirement. Quite quickly, I realised that the cause of this improvement was the considerable diminution of the ambient sound intensity from which they had benefited by leaving the workshops.”
Deafness as muscular defence
“This meant that their deafness did not stem from a lesion of the nervous system, but indeed from the defences that the musculature had spontaneously elaborated to defend the organism against such lesions. Thus one may say that deafness, the effect of a sonic aggression, is not necessarily the damage caused by it; it may also be the parry. A parry which, at the moment, is just as disagreeable for the individual, but which at least preserves him from an irreversible harm.”
“Instead of something being taken away from him, on the contrary, something has been added to what he has, namely a muscular reinforcement. When this tissue armour ceases to receive the assaults of noise, it ceases to work and ends up atrophying: as a result, the subject begins again to perceive sounds. For such is the paradox: it suffices that he no longer defend himself against noise.”
The elective scotoma of the EDF employee
A neurological means of defence of this type presents manifest inconveniences, since for the whole time the subject is exposed to the decibels, the effect of the remedy and the effect of the harm merge! Fortunately, there exist reactions to sound nuisances better adapted to the maintenance of the psycho-physiological equilibrium of the individual.
“At the request of EDF,” Alfred Tomatis continues, “I had to examine people who worked near alternators. According to a great many observers, the infernal noise of these machines made any life impossible in their vicinity. I took measurements, and indeed, it was unbearable! Some alternators easily develop 120 decibels and even more… One in particular was enough to startle an unwarned observer. It produced a noise at 2,000 hertz that gave you the impression that a needle was being driven into your skull!”
“Now, very strangely, the two workers who were there did not seem otherwise affected; there was even one who was calmly doing his correspondence! I of course wanted to examine him, and I noticed that he had an elective scotoma (a ‘hole’ in his hearing, in a way) at 2,000 hertz. In other words, he heard everything perfectly, except the noise of the alternator! From there to forming the hypothesis that it was at the psychological level that this particularly adequate self-defence had been elaborated, there was but a step that was soon taken. The course of events was to bring this hypothesis the most decisive verifications.”
“None so deaf…”
Thus, to be deaf is not only to be unable to hear, it is also not to want to hear (even if this will is not conscious). The old saying “None so deaf as those who will not hear…” finds in this fact a renewed topicality and pertinence.
“Our psyche,” Alfred Tomatis recalls, “is informed of what surrounds it acoustically only if it desires it; the setting in motion of our auditory apparatus is engaged only under certain psychological conditions, and the information that will penetrate the auditory canal will be selected according to criteria proper to each.”
Beyond anatomical deafnesses
In times when psychosomatics was not taken seriously and psychopathology was contained between the high walls of the “quarter of the insane”, medicine hardly wished to know anything but anatomical deafnesses (cerumen plug, of bone or skin, furuncle, benign necrosing osteitis of the canal, blockage of the tympanic membrane, affection of the ossicular chain, disorders linked to intoxications, etc.) or physiological ones (conductive deafnesses, which group together the pathological causes linked to the external and middle ear and partially to the inner ear in its mechanical part; perceptive deafnesses, which include all the affections of the cochlea and of the integrative apparatus up to and including the cortex).
But one can no longer deny today the importance of the psyche and of the role it plays even in the domains that seem most foreign to its influence. The time is past when one could commonly separate body and mind, the physical and the “moral”. We now know that our flesh is steeped in consciousness, and that there is no consciousness that is not incarnated. From then on, one will hardly be surprised that, in the one who does not hear or hears poorly, the auditory system is not necessarily at issue, or at least not alone at issue.
The prenatal origin of psychological deafnesses
In numerous works, Alfred Tomatis has defended the idea, central to his theory, that the edifice of hearing, like that of language, remembers the desire to communicate that must exist from before birth in a balanced being.
Everything begins indeed in the mother’s womb. If the latter does not respond to the embryo’s desire to communicate (for example, because the child is not deeply wished for), “it is,” writes the Professor, “a deafness that is liable to be elaborated, with, as a corollary, an absence of language. If this relation (between mother and foetus) is imprecise, the isolation in which the child confines himself will reveal on his hearing an absence of listening to language, a veritable disaffection of the power to listen.”
“The consequences are serious, since any communication with others will be distorted, and the information passed to a child endowed with such a way of hearing will find itself strongly distorted. (…) Another psychological response of the ear consists in using its selective power in listening, and just as one can at will truncate this or that instrument of an orchestra in the hearing of a score, so the child knows how to disconnect his listening from this or that voice that he decides no longer to hear. One observes from then on certain zones of his hearing, of his auditory field, in which he no longer knows how to hear and for which he can no longer benefit from the impulses necessary to arouse in him the desire to listen.”
“Thus will be created scotomisations addressed to certain voices, to certain languages. It is obvious that such cuts, although they free the child for a time, are not without danger, for they introduce a disorder of the relation — therefore of communication. If the desire to listen is blunted, it goes without saying that information no longer finds its support.”
Psychological deafnesses and school difficulties
Psychological deafnesses are very numerous. According to Alfred A. Tomatis, they are at the origin of most school difficulties in reading and spelling. A re-education is possible, notably thanks to the Electronic Ear, provided that these deficiencies have been detected, which sometimes develop without the knowledge not only of the subject, but of his entourage. They can be detected essentially by the pedagogue from the difficulties experienced in grammar, in spelling, in reading, by children whose intellectual level is moreover very satisfactory.
However, the Professor notes further, “the child is not the only one who can disconnect his listening, and a good many adults manage it too. We touch here on a broad problem that would require an in-depth study, that of the somatisation of our refusal to listen. Let us specify, however, that for adults afflicted with presbyacusis with age, audiometric investigations have revealed that they were principally losing their auditory selectivity. A reconditioning identical to that used for the re-education of children often gives satisfactory results, provided the subject submits to it for three or four months with motivation and assiduity.”
Hypnosis and induced scotomas
Implementation of self-defences: the mind takes charge of the affairs of the body. Somatisation of the refusal to listen: the body takes charge of the affairs of the mind. On the one hand as on the other, the psyche is concerned. “So true is this,” Alfred Tomatis comments, “that in Canada, I attended an experiment in which people were suggested under hypnosis not to hear certain noises. A very conclusive experiment: on waking, they presented the suggested scotoma! One may therefore wonder whether it would not be possible by the same means to arrive at the opposite result: to induce under hypnosis the suppression of a pre-existing scotoma of psychological origin.”
“Attempts of this kind deserve more respect and attention than is generally accorded them. Hypnotic suggestion, very much in favour with psychiatrists of the end of the last century, is no longer fashionable. But very great scientists have expressed the confidence they had in it for settling certain problems of a psychosomatic order.”
Noise, nourishment of the brain
Nearly everywhere, the struggle against noise is organising. One wants to preserve oneself from a scourge that is taking on every day more disquieting proportions. A priori, there is nothing in this but what is very laudable. And yet, it would be regrettable if this necessary counter-attack succeeded “too” well.
For Alfred A. Tomatis, as for most of those who have looked into this question, we need noise.
“It is certain,” he says, “that the human machine is not made to bear 140 decibels. But to wish to suppress noise completely is also to make man run a danger. Noise is a necessity. The ear is an energy dynamo that needs it. It needs it for four and a half hours per day to allow the brain to have its tone. Of course, the dose must be limited: the same goes for food, which also corresponds to a need, and yet must remain below a certain quantitative threshold, beyond which the organism would be damaged.”
“There is a veritable psychosis of noise that is developing. People end up thinking that all their ills come from there, forgetting that it is thanks to noise that they have the chance to have a brain always awake! It is even thanks to noise that our auditory perception can be refined.”
The anechoic chamber and madness
Besides, very numerous experiments have been attempted to know the reactions of an individual plunged into absolute silence. All lead to the same conclusions: deprived of sensory stimulation, the subject experiences an unease that goes on growing, soon engenders anxiety, then real anguish. At the end of the process: madness. It suffices, moreover, to have entered an anechoic chamber to understand the real problem that an existence deprived of sounds poses to the human organism and psyche.
The depressive and the fear of noise
“It must be observed,” the Professor underlines, “that most of the people who frantically seek to close themselves off from noise are depressives. The depressive will live in rooms more and more silent, then will put ear plugs in his ears. The more he puts in, the more tired he feels, the more his ear becomes depressed, the more his musculature breaks down… and the more he complains of noise!”
“In other words, more often than the noise, it is the psyche of the individual claiming to be its victim that must be incriminated. It happens that, for various reasons of the unconscious order, the depressive is someone who does not ‘want’ to hear. One may say that every time he ‘switches on’ his brain through external stimuli, that triggers in him psychic projections of a disagreeable tonality. He will therefore put himself sheltered from auditory sensations, on which he casts all the blame for his anguish. Everything stems from the fact that noises and projections use the same circuits, so that, by manifesting themselves, the former can bring forth the latter.”
Auditory hallucinations and differentiated thresholds
“I have always been struck by the fact that, if one plays a noise to a subject victim of auditory hallucination, this often suffices to trigger the morbid process. If he hears voices saying obscenities to him, for example, well, the auditory sensation of a bell sound at very low intensity will engender in him this hallucination. Yet if one increases the sound intensity, a moment comes when the subject is capable of forming a pertinent perception of the stimulus. He says what a balanced man would have said from the first second: ‘I hear the sound of a bell.’”
“The hearing of the auditory hallucinator therefore presents, on the same curve, two thresholds of different nature. The first is of a psychoanalytic order; the second is the one defined by psycho-physiologists, and has shifted upwards. The solidarity that links noises to projections is no doubt the best explanation of a fear of noise which, in many cases, has nothing rational about it.”
“Man is in search of all that can calm his anguish. The means of defence are as diverse as they are inappropriate: some take drugs, others invest in food, others still block their ears… Anything, provided that the abhorred projections do not come to sow disturbance in the psychic imagery!”
Place of this interview in the series
This interview is the ninth of a series of fifteen. For the complete contents, see the mother-article of the series.
Source: Alain Gerber, “Noise is necessary to us — Alfred A. Tomatis”, SON Magazine no. 38, Paris, May 1973. Digitisation: Christophe Besson, June 2010.