Listening with our whole bodies...

Here's a very interesting video clip which touches on the importance of listening with the perspective of helping Autistic children. I hope you notice that they are stimulating the children's vestibular system WHILE they are listening. (Rocking, swinging etc.)

I found a little more about how babies use listening while they are in utero (which is ALWAYS in motion) from Valerie DeJean.

Tomatis talks at length about the importance of fetal listening in the development of all the vestibular functions we have discussed so far, much of them related to the development of praxis. He also the importance of fetal listening on the later development of language.

We know that the ear is functioning in utero at five months gestation.

Babies are born imprinted to their mothers voice because they have been bathed in the sound of it for the last four months of gestation.

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound from which we form words.There are 52 phonemes from which all of the worlds 6000 languages are formed.

Ultra sound studies have shown that by the seventh month in utero, the fetus responds to each of the phonemes in a word spoken by the mother with a specific muscular movement.

Also the fetus responds immediately, in other words there is no timedelay between the sensory input of the mother's voice and the motorresponse of the fetus. A very fast system - and most likely is the boneconduction system, which Tomatis has always described as having a very rapid conduction. All this is preparing the baby for language.