What is AIT?

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 prac­tice as an otorolaryngologist-an ear, nose and throat specialist-I worked with many children whose hearing problems were affecting their schoolwork, 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 associated 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.

“Everything happens as if human behavior
were largely conditioned
by the manner in which one hears.”

The Bérard AIT technique was conceived and developed by Dr Guy Bérard, a French ENT specialist, who understood that behavior is very much related to the way in which we interpret language and sounds through our hearing mechanism. If we hear things in a distorted way, we will react in accordance with what we hear. And this has been proven to be a significant factor in contributing to behavioral problems such as ADHD, and even Autism.

Bérard AIT is a non-invasive, drug free technique for correcting deficiencies in the hearing chain from the eardrum to the brain by applying suitable processed music which exercises and stimulates the hearing mechanism to function correctly.

The music is applied to the ears via an instrument called an Earducator, which produces music that has been processed to randomly fluctuate between low and high frequencies.  The course comprises 20 half-hour sessions, twice a day, conducted over a period of two weeks.