LD Expert Podcast - Episode #57
Auditory Processing: Key to Increasing Confidence and Learning - Jill Stowell
Jill Stowell: “Fake it till you make it?” Sounds good, right? But what if you had to do that all the time? Children and adults with auditory processing challenges often find that “fake it till you make it” is a way of life.
Welcome to the LD Expert Podcast, your place for answers and solutions for dyslexia and learning differences.
Today, we’re discussing one of my favorite topics - auditory processing. We’re going to take a look at why it has such a profound impact on learning, social skills, and general sense of confidence and well-being. We’ll look at how auditory processing challenges might be affecting you or your child, and we’ll talk about what auditory training looks like and two simple techniques that you can use to stimulate your child’s listening and auditory system.
I’m your host, Jill Stowell, founder and executive director of Stowell Learning Centers and author of Take the Stone Out of the Shoe, A Must-Have Guide to Understanding, Supporting, and Correcting Dyslexia, Learning, and Attention Challenges.
Having a child or teen with dyslexia or a learning challenge can be very lonely for a parent. You feel like you’re the only one whose child is struggling and you don’t know who to talk to. This podcast is for you. We’ll equip you with knowledge and practical tools for understanding and helping your child. If this episode brings up any questions for you, or you’d like to speak with someone about your child, go to stowellcenter.com and give us a call.
Auditory processing is not your hearing - it’s how the brain perceives and thinks about or processes information that comes in through your ears.
I want to play a little clip for you to give you a taste of what it might be like to have an auditory processing challenge:
[Auditory Processing Disorder Simulation]
You knew this was a simulation, so it might have been kind of fun to try to pick out some words and piece the context together, but what if this is what it sounded like to you at a staff meeting or when you’re on the phone or helping a customer, or in a conversation with your friends? And it’s like this all day long? How is that going to affect you?
I can tell you. You’re going to be exhausted. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how determined you are, listening intently enough to really know what’s going on when the message is spotty or unclear is extremely taxing. As a survival mechanism, your brain is just going to quit listening.
Here’s what that looks like in a classroom - the child stops paying attention and starts playing with things on his desk.
The teen starts gazing off into space during lectures and you’re getting reports that she might have ADD.
We had a 12-year old student who really wanted to participate in discussions in class so at the beginning of his 6th grade year, he always raised his hand, but his auditory skills were so delayed that he missed most of what the other students said. When the teacher called on him, he would say something that a classmate had just said and everyone would laugh. Within 2 weeks, he just quit participating.
We had an adult student - a teacher actually - who was distressed that no one seemed to like her. Because listening was so hard for her, she talked all the time. She didn’t really realize she was doing this, but talking non-stop so she didn’t have to listen was an unconscious coping mechanism that was exhausting to everyone around her.
People are social creatures. If you’re feeling lost or confused much of the time in conversation, you’re going to tend to overcompensate as the teacher did by talking all the time, or you’re going to withdraw. You’re going to feel insecure in communication - afraid that you’ll say the wrong thing.
As parents, we want so badly for our kids to have friends. I remember a little boy named Jarod who could make friends, but he just couldn’t keep them and it broke his mom’s heart. Jarod was actually one of my very first students to do auditory training and I was looking for changes with speech articulation and reading, which we got, but his mom was most excited that Jarod had made and kept some really good friends.
Auditory processing impacts our energy and sense of well-being. Sound is vibration or frequencies. The high frequencies in sound provide energy to the cortex of the brain for focus and motivation.
Here’s an experiment for you to try: Notice how you feel right now. Now say this after me in a low, depressed, Eeyore voice: “Today is a good day.”
Notice how you feel. Does it feel like a good day? Now say the same thing in an energized, confident voice. “Today is a good day!”
Notice how you feel. Totally different, right? If you feel more “up,” your voice fed your brain high frequencies, which are energizing and uplifting.
Dr. Alfred Tomatis - a French physician and one of the very first pioneers in the field of auditory training, discovered what he called the “auditory feedback loop.” In his research, Dr. Tomatis found that the voice cannot reproduce what the brain cannot hear. People who frequently mispronounce words, have low energy, get confused or misunderstand when listening, have difficulty sounding out words, or speak with poor inflection or a monotone voice typically have poor listening skills. This is likely related to not processing a full range of sound frequencies, particularly those mid-range language frequencies and the high frequencies that make what we hear sound sharp and clear.
When we do auditory training, our students listen to specially engineered music, or sound therapy, that stimulates the auditory system to take in a full range of sound frequencies. Once the brain is processing a greater range of frequencies in sound, the listener will have better energy and better input with which to think and learn. Then we do active auditory training where the student and clinician are using headphones and a microphone to help the student’s voice acquire the wide range of frequencies that his brain is learning to hear or pay attention to.
Ultimately, the person’s voice becomes the ongoing stimulus for their own auditory system. Because of that auditory feedback loop between the voice and auditory system, our own voice can boost our energy and sense of confidence and well-being.
If you would like to learn more about the impact of music on the brain and the use of sound therapy to improve auditory processing, you can check out a previous LD Expert Live broadcast interview with Alex Doman, founder of Advanced Brain Technologies and developer of The Listening Program and other auditory training Programs. We’ll put the link in the show notes for you.
In our experience, the vast majority of students with dyslexia; autism spectrum disorder; reading, speaking, language, or comprehension challenges; and those with difficulties socially have delayed or inefficient auditory processing.
Sound therapy and active auditory training stimulates the auditory system to take in a full range of sound frequencies. With a clearer, more accurate, and complete message to think with, interventions for reading, speech, expressive language, and comprehension make more sense and get far better results. Memory and response speed improve because the student is getting better input to start with. They don’t have to expend extra time and mental energy to try to discriminate between similar words or try to connect the dots with spotty information.
I promised you I would give you two strategies that you could use at home to help stimulate your or your child’s auditory processing, so here we go:
The first is what we call a hand mic. You are literally going to use your hand as a microphone. Hold your right hand about one inch from your mouth and tilt it slightly toward your right ear. Read orally for 10 to 20 minutes a day using the “hand mic”. Your hand will absorb some of the low frequencies and direct the higher frequencies towards your right ear. In most people, the right ear is what you can think of as the language ear because there is a speedier connection between the right ear and the left hemisphere in the brain, which is the language hemisphere.
The 2nd strategy is called Thinking Caps. This is a Brain Gym activity. This is a great activity to do before listening to a lecture, going to a meeting, or whenever you need to perk up your ears for listening. You can do this with me right now.
With your thumb and fingers gently uncurl the curved parts of your ears and massage the ridge of your ears. Work your way down and back up a few times. This helps you tune out distracting noises and helps you focus on music or spoken language.
If you or your child are struggling because of weak auditory processing, don’t let anyone tell you that it cannot be improved. I remember a number of years ago one of our clinicians was doing an internship for school psychology. At her first IEP meeting, the school psychologist explained to the parent that her child had auditory processing delays. When Mom asked what could be done about it, our clinician was appalled to hear the psychologist say, “There’s nothing you can do to change it.”
Auditory training is certainly not as prevalent as it should be, but over 70 years of research and decades of clinical evidence show that the auditory system can be stimulated and developed. I’ve detailed some of the research and training programs in my book Take the Stone Out of the Shoe, so if you love to find out about how things really work scientifically and in the brain, take a look at that.
Here are our takeaways for today:
- Auditory processing has a profound impact on learning, social skills, and overall sense of well-being.
- Auditory processing can be developed through sound therapy and active auditory training.
- Using your right hand as a microphone can help stimulate the auditory system.
- The Brain Gym strategy, “Thinking Caps” can improve focus and listening.
Next week, we are welcoming back Adalyn Smith, a wonderful young college student who shared with us about what life is like with APD or Auditory Processing Disorder on one of our previous LD Expert Live shows. She will talk to us now about what it’s like to go through auditory training and how life is different for her now. You don’t want to miss this.
At Stowell Learning Centers, we help children and adults eliminate struggles associated with dyslexia and learning differences. We want to make this journey easier for you. Connect with us on social media and on our website, stowellcenter.com, for information and free resources.
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