We will be presenting a series of videos from the YouTube Berard AIT channel over the next few blogs, that explain the process of Auditory Integration Training (AIT).
We invite you to follow the series to learn about this fascinating behavioral intervention technique.
We will be presenting the series in a proper order on a weekly basis to avoid overloading you, but if you wish to view all the episodes before they are presented on our website, you are invited to visit the Berard AIT YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQLpgptd4zwm0gmvk-jZO2Q/videos?view=0
The founder of AIT was French Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist, Dr. Guy Berard, and you are invited to click on the podcast audio player below for more information. You can listen to the first episode of the series by clicking here, but we suggest that you listen to the podcast first, and then return to access the first episode.
INTRODUCTION BY DR.GUY BERARD TO HIS AUTHORITATIVE BOOK, “HEARING EQUALS BEHAVIOR”
It is obvious that people who cannot hear well will experience difficulties in many aspects of life, and particularly that children who cannot hear clearly what the teacher is saying will be at a great disadvantage in school. In my particular practice as an otorhinolaryngologist – an ear, nose and throat specialist – I worked with many children whose hearing problems were affecting their school work, and came to see two important things.
One was that there was a direct rather than an indirect connection between poor hearing and disruptive classroom behavior. That is, it is a common assumption that the child who can’t hear well becomes frustrated and bored, and because of this boredom and frustration ‘acts up”. There is something to that, of course, but it became clear to me in the course of my work that hearing problems had a much more direct effect on behavior, and later work and tests confirmed this.
The other major discovery concerned the nature of the hearing problems affecting behavior. Traditionally, hearing is regarded as ranging from “good” to ‘bad”, from being ‘able to hear a pin drop “to being extremely “hard of hearing”, and hearing function tests are performed from this point of view. However, it became evident that there were variations in hearing dysfunction, and that either abnormal sensitivity or abnormal insensitivity to certain frequencies – rates of vibration – of sound waves, independently of overall hearing ability, were clearly associate with many behavior and learning problems, including hyperactivity and dyslexia.
I devised a technique of auditory training, in effect a “reeducation” of the hearing mechanism, which in almost every case brought about the normalization of the response to the frequencies involved – and, almost always, the amelioration of the behavior or learning problem.
TO claim to have cured hyperactivity or dyslexia, widely regarded as “emotionally” or “mental” conditions, simply by training the ear to be either more or less responsive to particular sound frequencies seems on the face of it implausible and extravagant. However, thirty years of clinical work, research and follow-up on more than 2,100 patients, and study of more than 8,000 auditory cases, verifies the claim. Of the 1,850 learning/behavior problems patients, three-quarters showed very positive results and the remainder demonstrated noticeable partial improvement; none failed to show some benefit. Many more patients have been treated since then, but the percentages of improvement have remained identical.
As the work progressed, I found that two more “emotionally” based problems appeared to be related to this type of hearing dysfunction. One, which has occasioned a great deal of publicity, and in fact led to the establishment of the Georgina Organization, which is facilitating the publication of the book in the United States, is autism, that still-mysterious condition in which a person becomes a “prisoner inside himself”, severely limited in his or her ability to communicate with others and apparently uninterested in doing so. The complete cure of Georgiana Stehli, narrated in Annabel Stehli’s The Soundof a Miracle, is the most spectacular success with this condition. None of the 47 other autistic patients I treated up to 1982 achieved this level of success, but all did experience some improvement, many regaining the ability to speak or developing it for the first time; since that time I have been able with later patients to experience very important improvement, up to 90 percent.
The other “emotional” condition, suicidal depression, provides perhaps a more remarkable, certainly a more encouraging, story. I shall describe the discovery of the hearing-depression link in Chapter 3, and need here say only that 93 percent of the 233 patients treated for this condition were cured after the first course of auditory training, and 4.7 percent were healed after two or three courses.
In this book I shall explain how I arrived at the auditory training approach for these conditions and how I applied them, as well as showing how to determine If an individual’s behavior problems are caused by hearing problems, and demonstrating the nature of the auditory training process and the apparatus used for both testing and training. I shall also discuss the nature of the hearing process and of the particular hearing disorders I deal with here, and offer some speculations on why it is that they affect behavior as they appear to do. I must emphasize that such speculations can be no more than preliminary, and hope that future research will provide definite answers in this remarkable and important area.
Dr Guy Berard, 1993
