"The right ear: the most important" (SON Magazine no. 39, June 1973)
Tenth interview of the series Alain Gerber × Alfred Tomatis in SON Magazine. In no. 39, June 1973, Tomatis explores in depth auditory lateralisation and demonstrates the functional superiority of the right ear. The asymmetry of the two recurrent nerves (the left makes a loop under the aorta, much longer than the right) imposes a measurable neuronal delay of 0.05 to 0.40 second — beyond 0.15 s, the subject is always a stammerer. Tomatis identifies the right ear as the vector of the Father and of the Verb (“Father = Verb = Right”), explains why left-handers have wavelengths of 35 to 140 metres which keep them “in exile from their own word”, and recounts the actor cured of stammering in a few seconds after extraction of a wax plug from the right ear.
“SON” Magazine — no. 39 — June 1973
The right ear: the most important
Alfred A. TOMATIS
Interview gathered by Alain Gerber
Why two ears?
Alain Gerber: Professor, in the course of the various conversations we have had, you have often insisted on the fact that there was a “good ear”: the right. Can you tell us more on this subject?
Alfred Tomatis: From all times, it has been wondered in the history of men why there should be two ears. The philosopher Zeno said, not without a certain cynicism, that we had two ears and only one tongue to be able to hear twice as much as we spoke. He was mistaken, for in fact we have two tongues, soldered along the median part. Just as we have two mouths: look attentively at an adult, and you will notice that he speaks either with the right part (the right mouth) or with the left part (the left mouth) of his mouth.
A. G.: Just as we have two brains, corresponding each to one of the two hemispheres…
A. T.: Exactly. We have two eyes, two nostrils, two arms, two legs, two brains, etc. We have also and above all two larynxes, and that is the essential point in the matter that concerns us.
The directing ear — observation of singers
A. G.: And each time, one may observe a difference between the elements of the pair?
A. T.: For the ears, for example, attention was given to determining the angle of sound displacement in relation to each of them. It was asked whether this bipolar system was not destined to allow stereophonic listening, etc. In any case, when one is interested in language, one notices that in everything that is sound reproduction, the two ears function differently. Some say today that the left ear lets music pass through better than the right ear; others do not agree. I am persuaded, for my part, that from the moment we become musicians, only the right ear will “ignite”.
A. G.: You realised this, I believe, from observations of professional singers?
A. T.: Indeed, I started from the concrete experience of vocalists, then a little later of instrumentalists. Manifestly, these people had a “directing” ear. When I imposed on them a left ear, they experienced difficulties, often enormous, in the mastery of their art. With a right ear, on the other hand, everything always went very well. The subject even controlled himself much better. I noticed soon afterwards that what was true for singing and music was also true for language.
The asymmetry of the two recurrent nerves
A. G.: But how can this be explained?
A. T.: Certain research, not mine, has been oriented towards the cortex. It was tried to see what the differentiation of the two brains might consist in. It was thought that one was more vascularised than the other (the left), that their weights were different, that they were not chemically identical. But the examinations yielded nothing. And they yielded nothing, because there is nothing to find in that direction.
A. G.: So?
A. T.: So, the solution is simpler than that. The two ears are differentiated because the impulses leaving the brain cannot reverberate, for the production of a sound, except at the level of the larynx, of which the human being has made his privileged instrument of communication. Now at the level of the larynx, there is asymmetry, and that is why the two ears have become asymmetrical.
A. G.: But this asymmetry in the larynx, where does it come from?
A. T.: A simple matter of anatomy! The first point to consider is the asymmetry inherent in the two recurrent nerves, by reason of which the routing of the neuronal influxes does not benefit from a path of the same length on the right as on the left.
A. G.: What exactly are the recurrent nerves of which you speak?
A. T.: They are the two branches of the pneumogastric nerves. They have the same destination: the larynx, but they reach it by adopting totally different itineraries. While the right recurrent goes towards the right laryngeal wall after having crossed below the right subclavian artery, the left recurrent, longer than the right, plunges into the thorax to the level of the aorta, makes a loop beneath it and goes off in an ascending vertical direction to join the left lateral side of the larynx.
The measurable neuronal delay
A. G.: What are the consequences of this?
A. T.: The time of the neuronal impulses is different. In the self-listening circuit, which therefore links the larynx to the ear, one of our ears is closer to the phonatory organs than the other: it happens to be the right. If you use the left, an element of delay will intervene, which can be measured. It varies of course with individuals, but it can cover between 0.05 and 0.40 second. From 0.15, the subject is always a stammerer.
In the normal audio-phonatory circuit, you have five stages: right ear, auditory centre of the left brain, laryngeal motor centre of the left brain, muscles of phonation, mouth-to-right-ear path. In the circuit that starts from the left ear, you have six, for from the left ear one passes to the auditory centre of the right brain, and it is then that, to reach the laryngeal motor centre of the left brain, a transfer to the left cerebral centre is indispensable. It is this transfer that constitutes the element of delay. In sum, the right ear, by its innervation, is much closer to the information.
Father = Verb = Right
A. G.: What does this mean?
A. T.: One would have to take up here all that I have already told you about the birth of language. In brief, the child communicates first with his mother, and that from before birth. At this stage, there is not yet any true differentiation of the ears, for the good reason that there is not yet any need to strain the ear, to “aim” sounds precisely. Communication takes place through caresses, smiles, syllables devoid of meaning, etc. But at a certain moment of his evolution, the child will encounter the father. The father is the vector of socialised language. To understand him, to integrate this language that he speaks and which for the child, let us note in passing, is his first foreign language, one will need to strain the ear — and the right one. The right one, because it is, for all the reasons seen above, the one whose use requires the least effort from the subject. Thanks to it, the response will be almost immediate, and above all much more precise. It is from there that the symbolic identification is created, Father = Verb = Right, so important for understanding the unconscious life of individuals. Invested at the right, the father mythically represents Becoming, while the mother is the left, the past.
When the child chooses the left ear
A. G.: But if the relations between the child and his father are not good?
A. T.: It is precisely in this case that the child chooses the left ear, because it places the interlocutor at a distance and thus allows protection from him. One is dealing with a long circuit whose conductors are the left ear, mouth and larynx.
A. G.: The left ear is not the good ear, but it nevertheless plays a role in the apprehension of language?
A. T.: No doubt. When you read, although you do not realise it, there is principally one eye that works, the other only grasping the overall volume. The same goes for our ears: the right one aims at a precise sound, the left gives an overall panorama of the sound environment.
The wavelengths of the left-hander
I would like to add something about the differentiation: it has been observed that the right ear “measured” the lowest frequencies. Only, there is a gap between the two. For the right circuits, the subject uses wavelengths from 35 to 70 centimetres. On the other side, these wavelengths range from 35 to 140 metres! This means in particular that the left-hander not only has difficulty entering into relation with the other, whom his left ear locates very far away, but also does not manage to touch his own body with the wavelengths he uses. His left-handedness — in the sense, this time, of clumsiness, of ill-ease — is but the translation of this remoteness that holds him as it were in exile from his own word.
Should the passage to the right be forced?
A. G.: Should we then constrain children to listen on the right?
A. T.: At least one time in two, the choice of the left stems from a refusal of the right. If you force the child to come back to the right, you will in fact lead him to refuse both sides! He will find himself bereft both on the right and on the left, and you will have provoked a regression.
A. G.: Which can be translated in what way?
A. T.: Stammering is a frequent consequence of regression, since it consists in a return to the babbling stage where the newborn was during the first verbal relations with the mother.
A. G.: Does this mean that nothing should be done in the presence of a poorly lateralised child on the auditory plane?
A. T.: Of course not! At the beginning, when a child “with left tendency” was presented to me, I tackled his left ear and vice versa for a child with “right tendency”: I went towards the dominant defined by the psychologist. What was interesting is that the child “with left tendency” immediately became a homogeneous left-hander, which improved his school results and conferred on him, in everything, a better equilibrium. However, given his possibilities, this performance was still less good than if he had been homogeneously right-handed. It was only from there that I wondered whether one should not systematically lateralise hearing to the right. I therefore began to tackle the right ear of all the subjects who came through my hands. The results exceeded my expectations. I notably saw left-handed subjects become right-handed and, by that fact alone, acquire a markedly superior equilibrium and yield. It was above all at the level of language that the progress recorded was the most spectacular.
So, no problem: it is in everyone’s interest to hear with their right ear. Only, there must be no constraint! One must rebalance the subject progressively and never do him violence, thanks to an educational process whose details I have already had the occasion to give you. The Electronic Ear allows a definitive righting in a few months without the subject’s being traumatised. The deep interest of the treatment is that, in making a subject pass from the left ear to the right ear, it greatly improves his cerebral yield.
The controlling brain (right) and the executing brain (left)
A. G.: How so?
A. T.: It is a long story. You must first know that until a very recent epoch, it was thought that there was one brain, the left, that did more work than the other. It was even said that the left brain was the major brain.
A. G.: And you don’t agree?
A. T.: No! That is not how the problem should be posed. The two cerebral hemispheres have a different activity, but an equally important one. There is asymmetry, but there is not really hierarchy, although the right hemisphere has the function of controlling what the left hemisphere does. I would willingly say that one is the controlling brain, the integrator, and the other the executing brain. What must be clearly specified is that, contrary to what is generally believed, everything of the mechanical order (executing a voluntary movement with the hand, for example) is effected by the left brain, even if it is the right hand that is moved. The right brain, on the other hand, exerts its control over both right and left. But for this, the information must be received by the right ear, for if it is received by the left ear, it is the right brain that will take charge of the execution and, in doing so, will no longer be able to exert its function of control properly. In other words, each hemisphere can fulfil its function perfectly only if listening is centred on the right ear.
The wax plug that made an actor stammer
A. G.: Is the disorder so important when it is the left that listens?
A. T.: I shall give you only one example. I received one day in consultation a great actor whose name I shall keep silent, since he is still active. He was making a film, and suddenly he had begun to stammer. He saw a doctor; he was advised to rest: to no avail, he stammered all the more. The shooting had to be stopped. He entered a clinic and underwent a sleep cure. On waking, he was still stammering! He then came to knock at my door, advised by friends. I cured him in a few seconds: simply by removing a thick wax plug that was obstructing… his right ear!
You see what damage left-side listening can cause. That said, it is certain that a great many subjects manage to adapt to this poor lateralisation, even to show much brilliance in their activities, intellectual or otherwise. But however well they may get by, they would be much more masters of their means if they heard on the other side.
When the right ear is definitively lost
A. G.: What happens when, for various reasons, the right ear is rendered definitively unusable?
A. T.: The drama is that the subject risks one day experiencing the greatest difficulties in speaking. Here, we teach him to hear no longer through the right ear, but through the “right side”.
A. G.: What do you mean by that?
A. T.: The mistake is to believe that only the tympanums vibrate. The skull also vibrates, and account must be taken of it. We also teach the patient to use the right side of his left ear, that is to say the side of that ear that attacks the left brain.
A. G.: How so?
A. T.: A matter of anatomy, once again. It is wrong to believe that all the nerve fibres are crossed, that the right-left, or left-right, relation is the only possible one. Let us examine the ear. If one observes how the nervous system is organised at this level, one notices that in the part of the ear called “primary” (the two utricles and the semicircular canals), this system is built originally as a bilateral apparatus. Better than that, the bundles are not even crossed: the whole right side of the ear corresponds to the right side of the medulla, for example. It is only later that the two primitive nerves will give crossed bundles. Approach a little closer to the cortex, and one will see that everything is interlinked…
The unity of the being: Yin and Yang
A. G.: To cut the body in two, as was done not long ago, is therefore a mistake?
A. T.: You mean it is an unbelievable dishonesty! How to distinguish so sharply a right and a left, since, if three-fifths of the bundles are crossed, there are two-fifths that are direct?
A. G.: One can therefore envisage a point of fusion: at a given moment, an individual uses the totality of his being?
A. T.: It is precisely the idea I want to defend. We must free ourselves from this notion of right and left which cuts the being in two and makes us forget what is fundamental, namely its unity. The two sides are, I would say, “inter-useful”: they must necessarily exist in an equilibrium that requires there to be as much right as left, for there is no right without left, as in a magnet. Precisely, it is a question of a bipolarity: there is a plus and a minus with an equal quantity of left potentiality and right potentiality. The left side, if you like, is the material; the right side is the dynamic that will organise it. One finds there a little of the play of the Yin and the Yang of the Chinese. The ideal of equilibrium, for a human being, is the functional harmonisation of right and left. And it is precisely this harmonisation that requires one to be right-handed, not only of hand and foot, but also of speech and thought, so that the controlling right brain be left free to do its work.
“To be right-handed all the way to the left”
A. G.: Is that why you wrote somewhere that to be right-handed was to be “adroit” of oneself?
A. T.: Yes, and it goes much further than a simple play on words. Left-handedness is always a handicap. It is essential to use the right, and even the right part of the left: this is what I call “being right-handed all the way to the left”. Many deficiencies have as their origin a poor auditory lateralisation — beginning with dyslexia, which today wreaks such havoc among children.
A. G.: One last question: auditory lateralisation is independent, according to you, of overall lateralisation. One can be right-handed in everything, and yet hear on the left?
A. T.: Absolutely. And the proof is precisely your own case!
Place of this interview in the series
This interview is the tenth of a series of fifteen. For the complete contents, see the mother-article of the series.
Source: Alain Gerber, “The right ear: the most important — Alfred A. Tomatis”, SON Magazine no. 39, Paris, June 1973. Digitisation: Christophe Besson, June 2010.