From the Ear to the Brain

Automatic transcription (faster-whisper), proofread. The punctuation and certain proper names may contain approximations.

Welcome, Mr. Tomatis. So, today the subject of the lecture concerns above all language and the integration of languages and the brain. All this forms a whole. You are going to speak to us about the results of your research, of the experiments you carry out around the world. I gather that the national education system is finally making overtures, for until now there were only the classic French methods for learning languages.

You know the results we have today, the repercussions and the consequences at the level of the business world, for we have a very strong demand for language training — English, Spanish, and so on, Portuguese, and above all German. There are now somewhat more modern means, but ones that are not easily understood. That is what you are going to explain to us. You wrote “Deaf as a Frenchman.” It would be interesting to know what you mean by that. You also wrote “Tell me what you write.”

If you listen, I will tell you who you are. We are going to listen to the professor for about an hour and a half. We will then move on to questions, about half an hour. There is a questionnaire that has been handed out to you. I would ask you to fill in this questionnaire. We will collect these questions and group them by family in order to save time.

And the professor will then answer your questions in about an hour and a half. Thank you for your welcome. I am delighted to be among you for the second time. All the more delighted because the first welcome was extraordinary. A dynamic that took hold at a certain point, which was extraordinary, which I have not forgotten. It seems to me it was yesterday.

I have the impression that today I am going to carry on from where we left off. The program you ask of me is colossal. It is not an hour and a half of talk to give, but several days. To speak of the integration of languages and the brain is a whole colossal problem. And on top of that, I saw that I was being asked questions that touch on more than languages, a bit on everything, notably on the dynamics of the brain itself, on the dynamics of lateralization, on knowing what a laterality is, and so on. I have brought along a few documents.

Rest assured, I will not put you through all of it. We would be here for several days. But depending on the questions you give me, I will no doubt rely more heavily on showing you a few diagrams, a few projections. Indeed, I have been working on languages for a very long time, for about forty years. I was led to languages in the following way, working first with singers. I wanted to know why a singer sang.

I realized they had exceptional ears. I dealt with singers who could not pronounce certain vowels, certain consonants, notably the Venetians, who could not produce the tip-of-the-tongue R. In trying to see why they had these difficulties, I realized that they did not hear them. Indeed, examining ears in large numbers, I was trained and practiced at it. At the naval arsenals, I was in the habit of examining everyone who worked on the jet engines and seeing what damage they had to their ears. I realized that there were ways of hearing, but above all ways of listening.

I realized that there were ways of hearing, but above all ways of listening. You can have a fabulous ear and not listen; conversely, you can have a mere remnant of hearing and desperately want to listen. It is the dimension of listening that brought us all the keys, and people who do not hear that in a phoneme do not know how to listen to it. The fact is that when I managed to make my good Venetians hear like a Neapolitan, taking Caruso’s ear as my criterion, they pronounced all the arias they wished. How had I seen Caruso’s ear? It was easy for me; I had realized at the arsenals that a subject who had suffered damage to his ear no longer produced the harmonics he had lost, which is logical.

If you do not hear certain things, it is very difficult to reproduce them. Well, starting from there, doing the whole analysis of Caruso’s entire voice, I came to see how he must have heard from day to day, and by implanting that ear in my good Venetians, I saw them pronounce the tip-of-the-tongue R, the way a Neapolitan knows how to do it. After that, I wondered whether there might not be other ears. I had a great many singers of all backgrounds at the time; they had quite specific ears. I found, why not, English ears. Other ears.

And there, I realized that there is a certain satisfaction, fundamentally, in understanding why a Frenchman who, whatever his potential, was blocked with respect to English in particular — among whom I counted myself, of course, and like everyone else I tried to learn English at the time, and in class, putting in a few hours, after a certain stretch, a certain six or seven years of English, I no doubt only pronounced words, and badly — well, I realized that this was not linked to a factor of effort, nor to a factor of intelligence, but to an auditory diaphragm that was not opened as it should be. I spent five years on the problem of languages, trying to look at many languages. I examined about 800 languages. That does not mean I know them. But in the laboratory I was able to make an analysis, at a given moment, of phonemes; I was able above all to make an analysis of sentences, and to find the curve of the envelopes of languages. They are very different.

I found no more than twelve of them, however. I think that with twelve ways of hearing, one ought to be able to examine quite a few other languages. It is true that there are 5,000 of them, so I leave it at that. I take it upon myself to do so. But what is interesting is that when you take any subject and have him hear in the manner of an Englishman, well, you see him integrate English at top speed; in the manner of an Italian, immediately he pronounces in the Italian way, and better than that, he holds himself otherwise, he postures himself otherwise. And at the start, I had all these results in hand, and without knowing why, for years I applied the technique.

Oh no, much further, since I also thought that the child with school difficulties was, with respect to his mother tongue, as one can be with respect to English or anything else, and in applying these techniques, I was thus able to free quite a few children from their problems, quite a few adults from their problems of language and communication; and then, along the way, one cannot keep working in such a direction, with so many results, without nonetheless asking oneself a few questions, and that is perhaps what I am going to set out for you, thinking I now see better how the brain works in the face of language. The ear is an exceptional organ, and one that is poorly understood; we are beginning to see it a little more clearly, and there you are well placed, since people who go into space are beginning to think more about more than hearing, and to think about the vestibule. Indeed, the ear is what gives us balance, what gives us our sense of space, what also gives us the mechanics of the whole body. There is not a single muscle of the body that does not depend on the ear, from the scalp to the toe. As I was saying, the moment you do anything, you read, you write, it is always the ear that is involved, through the most archaic part, which is called the vestibule. This vestibule, as we shall see, is a part that comprises the utricle, the saccule, and the semicircular canals.

This is how the ear presents itself: it is a bony shell, hard as ivory, which has several parts inside. Within this bony shell, we have three parts. This one, which will depend on the utricle and the semicircular canals; this part here, which will depend on the saccule, this set being called the vestibule; and there, the cochlea. The cochlea is theoretically credited with hearing. And it is true that when one speaks of the ear, one always thinks of hearing. And now, thanks to investigations in space, one thinks just a tiny bit about the vestibule, but that is a rather secondary phenomenon.

At present, it is still thought that the ear serves us only for hearing. Yet without a vestibule, you cannot listen. If you do not adopt the posture of listening, you will not have your ear strained. And to strain the ear is to strain the body, to strain the face, to strain the whole system. We will come back to it shortly. When one opens this shell, inside there is an organ — here it is — which is called the membranous labyrinth.

There, we see better all that happens. There is the utricle, there is the saccule, and there, the cochlea. This diagram, which is classic in all the books of the world dealing with psychology, with listening and with hearing, shows roughly where the ear is located. It is about 4 cm deep, in that direction; and I point it out all the more because what one sees in all the books, unfortunately, is the posture of non-listening. Someone who held himself like this would be hearing, but not listening. To listen implies a greater verticality, and for the ear to work well, it should be roughly like this.

The horizontal line passing through the closed eye should descend a little lower than the opening of the right ear. In that posture, you will be a listener. When you listen to music, when you take part, when you are completely engaged — if at a given moment you have to sing, you are forced to adopt this posture; otherwise you do not sing, or in any case you do not listen to much of anything. You tire immediately the moment this comes away. What does that mean? Well, the utricular part here will give us the horizontality of the head, in the measure I have just given you.

The verticality of the trunk: if there is no verticality, and no horizontality either, you will not have good listening, and you will struggle to engage. It is true, as I told you earlier, that depending on the languages and on the linguistic approach, we will hold ourselves differently. If you take an Englishman, he will tend to have a slender, willowy build; and if you change languages, you will see that you change posture — you are not the same fellow, you do not have the same bearing, you are altogether different — and I think that to enter a language is to enter not only into the hearing of the language, but into the gestures of that language. Higher, I’d say even higher. Lower, suddenly. Lower.

Lower. Lower. Lower. Lower. Putting it onto the ear. Lower.

Ah, yes, lower. There it is, that’s it exactly. Good. The difficulty of the ear in its anatomy has caused it to be designated a labyrinth. I think that is why everyone gets lost in it. In fact, it is a unit.

And it is because we have difficulty — the anatomists came along, cut a little slice — that one no longer understands much of it. In fact, it is a unit. But here, I think one has to be better equipped to understand what it is about. It is a unit that, at a given moment, multiplied, that perfected itself. Like those satellites we send into space, which will give the maximum of what they can deliver. And then, at a given moment, when they have given everything, having put in place the energy of their gift, one can add something to them and attach something separate.

Well, the ear did the same. It first had the utricle, then it had the semicircular canals, then it had the saccule, and finally the cochlea. The utricle is already found in the lower lines, in fish notably. Then we see an increase in the system. In the amphibians, the saccule appears, which saccule will already permit the race toward verticality. In birds, the inner part here, which is called the lagena, begins.

And only the mammals will have the whole. But as soon as there is a mammal, there will be a race toward verticality. And to convince yourself of it is easy. You see that verticality is necessary in order to speak. This evening, on getting home, try to get down on all fours and attempt to deliver a speech. Commonplace things, you will be able to say.

A few words, you will be able to get out. But to speak at length, without the image of the body, you will not be able to do it. If we look much further, into the genesis of language, a child who cannot stand up cannot speak. If he does not walk, he will have no phrasing. There is therefore a whole dynamic. A child begins to let out a few words as soon as he can sit, he begins to babble.

As soon as he stands up, the words appear. As soon as he begins to walk, as soon as he takes to walking, the verb appears, the dynamic appears, the sentence begins. So there a whole junction is necessary. But if a child starts too late, if he reaches verticality and walking after 26 months, for example, 24 to 26 months, he will not be able to reach walking. He will then not be able to reach language. So there, a systematic implication.

This apparatus is set in motion thanks to a middle ear. For us, with our activity, what was generated first is therefore the inner ear. Then comes the outer ear. And finally the middle ear between the two — here it is — which is important. And when you want to determine, at a given moment, the learning of a language, it is at this level that you play. The inner ear is here, which I have just shown you.

The outer ear is outside, with its pinna. Here is the tympanic membrane. And there, you have two blocks. A block in blue here, the incudomalleolar block, made of the hammer and the anvil, with a muscle here, the muscle of the hammer. And inside, you have the stapes and the stapedius muscle. To become a linguist, to become a singer, to become a listener, is to become an athlete or a virtuoso of the stapedius muscle, when all is said and done.

The stapedius muscle has a particular fate, namely that it too was born with the mammals. It is very late. It is the most recent of the muscles of the organism. No doubt that is why we have so much trouble commanding it. To be able to command it is also difficult, because there is no consciousness that will inhabit it. And yet, to be a listener is to know how to play upon it.

There is another drawback, which is that it is the smallest in the body. It is 6.2 mm. So we have trouble playing upon it the way we play upon a biceps. And that also explains why we have trouble educating it, why it is fragile, and why it risks, at a given moment, being very quickly damaged. Let me give you a small example in passing. If you wear earplugs, for example, if you put earplugs in at night, in no time at all this muscle atrophies, it no longer plays, and you suffered from the noise before.

Afterward, you are going to die of it. The more earplugs one puts in, the more one is in depression. It can even be forbidden, if you like, from the standpoint of its use. Another effect of this muscle: it is an extensor. It is the last of the extensors. If you are lucky enough to know how to play upon the stapedius muscle, your verticality is assured.

The one who knows how to listen is at every moment, at a given moment, called upon to hold himself in an upright posture. One cannot play upon the stapes easily. Although now you can be educated to do so. The electronic techniques we use act only upon this musculature. But we are fortunate to be able to make this musculature work, to work it ourselves, by exercising all the muscles of the face. The muscles of the face are innervated by the facial nerve.

Now, the stapedius muscle is innervated by the facial nerve. Each time you pull on the whole face, you see that people who listen well have no wrinkles. And the people who are the opposite, like Beethoven, who is a wrinkled apple — that was the movement that needed to be made. One can never hear anything. And the more force there was in his reactions, it is certain that he had the possibility of having an ear that was strained in the high frequencies. Indeed, the stapes, well strained, normally gives us the ascending curve across all our octaves, from 16 cycles to 16,000, some going a little higher; but as a rule, to open this diaphragm, there must be a harmonious interplay between the muscle of the hammer, which is a flexor, and the stapedius muscle, which is an extensor.

This one is innervated by the fifth pair, which explains that each time you listen, there is an interplay that occurs at the level of the fifth pair. Going open-mouthed is already opening the ear. It is a bit of a letting-go. Someone who does not want to listen clenches his teeth, locks his teeth, that is to say he plays at once upon the fifth and upon the seventh pair, and your message will not get through. Right away, you know whether someone is listening to you or not. There is a kind of attention, but the attention will play out on the interplay of these two musculatures.

Inside the ear — I tell you this rather quickly, since we want to get to the brain — there is a cell, and one that is old as the world, since it is a protozoan, a flagellate when all is said and done, which thus lived quite peacefully in its time, its flagellum allowing it to listen to the world. This flagellate then found itself used in all the animal lines, from the jellyfish to man, to be able to bring information to the cells placed all around. As soon as we pass from the protozoan to the metazoan, we are obliged at a given moment to have information that passes inside. Well, little implanted cells, which are once again flagellates, will give the information inside, and they have this appearance. And since the dawn of time, they are always the same. You see them there in fish, it is a flagellate, but instead of having one cilium, there are a few more.

One that is always larger, called the kinocilium. There it is in frogs, it is always the same cell. There they are in birds, it is the guinea pig. They have roughly the same, always the same appearance. Perhaps there is a slight differentiation, one is a bit oblong, while the other is a bit more straight. But there are the two cells one will find in man.

And they are the same, always with a kinocilium in the upper part. We are going to see what that corresponds to. The good fortune of this information being able to pass is that each time the kinocilium is touched, immediately here, at the lower part, an electrical response is prepared. There is therefore at a given moment an electrical transmission at this level, which will carry the information to the lower part, and there, in these sorts of pouches, or in this envelope that is here, you will have a physico-chemical phenomenon. So there is a time, there is a passage that occurs by excitation, and as recently as twenty years ago, 20 to 25 years, it was thought that there was direct information toward the brain. But it was realized that these cells were isolated, they were independent, planted a bit like flowerpots in the soil.

They are therefore, at a given moment — it is here that the transmission will occur by transmitters. But here is what the electron microscope reveals, which is interesting. Each time information is sent to the upper part, well, immediately, this part you have there, these little dots that are mitochondria, the nucleus is there. These cells have this characteristic, that the nucleus is basal and not median. The cells are thus at the distal part, and immediately, as soon as information passes, one sees the trail of mitochondria moving to carry the information to the lower part. Everything is a phenomenon of information at this level.

We see a photograph even more beautiful, I think, of the path of the information. We see it even better there. We see it here on the periphery. We see one more. So now, I think that what allows us also to understand better the mechanics of the middle ear is that we know that the information going from the cell to the brain is not simply, as was once thought, going from the ear to the brain at 100%. The Lausanne school, about 15 years ago, had realized that there must be afferent filters that came, on the contrary, that came from the brain and captured what one wanted.

They very quickly found 10% of them, which was already phenomenal, and that explained that we were going to listen to what we wanted to hear. At present, the work of the Montpellier school comes to demonstrate to us, about a year ago, that there are 90% of the cells that come from the brain toward the ear. In other words, when you want to strain your ear, you do it; when you do not want to listen, you manage to cut off, and one cuts off, I think, at several levels. We have every means of knowing how to cut off. One can cut off on the outside, close the auditory eyelid, which the child sometimes does. Children who present as deaf and whose ear is good have shut everything down.

You can also, at a given moment, make a scotoma, cut off regions. You do not want to hear, as the child does, the voice of the father, you cut off between 1,000 and 2,000 Hz. You do not want to hear the mother, you cut off from 2,000 Hz up. A man who does not want to hear his wife does the same, and so on. You can also cut off one side rather than the other. If at a given moment you have a crisis that makes it so you can no longer enter into communication with someone, you have a means.

But all the means we use are always bad, since we are mistaken about something. One of the means is to provoke what is called a clonus, that is to say a myoclonus. You all have, from time to time, a muscle that amuses itself by twitching in the face. The day it is the upper eyelid that begins to dance, it means you do not want to see, but you do not dare admit it to yourself. As long as it is the face that sings, that twitches like that, it is not bothersome. But the day you begin to recruit no longer the eye, but the stapedius muscle, it is the whole mess of everything going haywire, all the fluids are stirred up, and you have a Ménière’s vertigo.

A Ménière’s vertigo is the signature of a connection that can no longer be made. The result is that you fall into the air, which does not help anything. The second result is that the ear, to try to safeguard a little balance, will create a hypertension inside in order to press the stapes footplate so that it no longer moves, but you are deaf and you are flooded by inner noise. Ménière’s vertigo is an ear that is not dead, but it no longer hears outside, it hears only inside, which is, all the same, a bit catastrophic. We now know — and this is fortunate — that we can re-educate them, we can take them in hand. A Ménière’s vertigo about which nothing could be done in the past is easily recoverable, and it is certain that the subject then confronts his psychological problem anew, and by going further, we allow him to make the leap and to know how not to listen to the other without being forced to have his ears cut off.

Remember that Van Gogh cut off his ear completely. It ended with a bandage. But one can go further, the child goes much further. One can cut off a cortical particle and at a given moment use something that is important. This energy that leaves the ear, that goes inward and is going to transmit, sends out stimulations. At present, we know that the ear brings between 60 and 90% of the brain’s energy.

Stimulations. For a brain to function, we know that it needs 3 billion stimulations per second, at least 4.5 per day. And the ear is one of the elements that brings the most. It brings a great deal through the verticality it imposes, that is to say the anti-gravitational struggle. There is therefore a stimulation. The more toned you are, the more upright you are.

The more upright you are, the more toned you are. The more lying down you are, the more worn out you are. There is a whole dynamic to be revised. Well, if one is fortunate enough to have good ears, one thus manages to stand upright. But if, by chance, an imbalance is provoked — which another can do, which a child sometimes does — by provoking a dissociation of the two ears, a kind of potential difference that occurs, one can have at the level of the thalami a clash that will produce the absence. If this absence escapes us, one can have epileptic seizures.

An imbalance of the two ears. If one rectifies the two ears, one often stands a chance of recovering them. There. Larger still, this famous kinocilium. A few years ago, it was not thought to exist. But not so very long ago.

It is always thanks to the people who go into space that we have thought of it. But here is how one can see it. It is said to be a little different. And this brings grist to my mill, because I have long maintained that man is wholly an ear. And we shall see it shortly. It is true that this organ is, in the end, a hair.

Well, on the periphery one can lose the nucleus. One can lose an ear and keep only the hair. And the hair is already a response, another use we are going to make of the ciliated cell. If one manages — we shall see it shortly — to remove a layer of gelatin that lies above the cells, one finds these assemblies in which there is the kinocilium and the other cilia around it. Here is yet another image. It is very beautiful.

This is an electron microscope. One sees very well here. There is one I always show. It is a beautiful picture. It is so beautiful that I had it enlarged to put up at my home. It is a beautiful abstract picture.

Look how pretty it is. These are kinocilia, cilia. One sees up there the kinocilium. And there, there is a layer of polysaccharide in which there are little elements that are little pebbles. These little pebbles are the equivalent of what one sees in the lower lines. That is to say, fish at a given moment have an open ear.

It is what is called the otolith. That is to say, inside there are cells like this one and a pebble that sits above. This pebble, depending on the position of the animal, will give stimulation at the level of the cilia. These cilia will give stimulation to the nervous system, which will give more dynamic. If one day you are mischievous and you go to remove this little pebble in the fish, you will see that it will stay motionless at the bottom, trying to plunge its head into the sand to find another pebble. And if ever you put it in a corner where there is no sand, you will see it manufacture for itself, at a given moment, a little nucleus of limestone in order to be able to reuse its energy.

Which will excite here. It will have as much tone as it wants. What is interesting, if one makes a section at this level, like this, one sees the cells topped with cilia, one of which is always more important, the kinocilium. Magnifying much more, here again a larger cilium, and there we are between 50,000 and 70,000 times. Here is what it gives. You see that there is an internal part.

The roles of the whole system are not very well known, but the periphery is a little line, like a hair. And it is dominant. Why is it dominant, and how does that work? It is that we now know that the fluids do not move continuously in all directions, as one might have thought at the start. But there is always, at a given moment, the kinocilium giving us the direction of the movements of the fluids in the vestibule. A hair, one sees it well here, is an insertion.

Here are the little otoconia, that is to say the little concretions of limestone that are in… This one is in the rat. There you have the guinea pig. That, that is man. There is the guinea pig. What is interesting in man is that one sees very well in space, the crystals are in the three dimensions of space.

Indeed, we can always, as we move, know where we are. And thanks, at a given moment, to these little inclusions that are contained within a set of polysaccharides that keeps the whole in a state of gravitation. So, whatever position you adopt, it always stays in place. There is no influence of gravity upon it. Here is the part in which we were. We are there.

And there, we have the openings of the semicircular canals. There too, there are cells. These cells here. They give us, at a given moment, also, here, a topography of the cells that correspond to the body. I think the head is at the bottom and the feet are there. And these cells too have the good fortune to be embedded in a great brush of polysaccharides, with, also, possibilities of excitation from the upper part, by the fluid that will, at a given moment, push the cupula.

And here, the otolith of the saccule, of the utricle. It is a great brush. You see that the cells are, in fact, the same. I was telling you earlier that the fluid moves in certain directions. Here is how it moves. In the saccule, here, the fluids are pushed outward.

They are centrifugal with respect to this axis. In the utricle, on the contrary, they are median. And we would have here the entrance of the anterior and external semicircular canals. And the posterior one, there, on the other side on the contrary, is where the drainages are. There is a circulation that occurs. And there, we have what happens in the ampullae.

I have maintained, though I still cannot demonstrate it — although one finds it in certain… in certain fish — that the fluids in the semicircular canals are always in rotation. And I think that movement is a change in this rotation. It is an extremely sensitive organ that is going to move all the time and that is going to benefit from the vascularizations. This organ vibrates ceaselessly. And the fluids inside it circulate all the time. And each transformation of this permanent fluidity makes it so that, at a given moment, there is awareness of a movement, awareness of the body image.

And you have the proof right here: if ever I were to take a very slow and very monotone speech, a bit as one does in hypnosis, well, you will see that you are going to little by little perhaps listen to me, but while almost having a loss of the body image. Hypnosis is that. If I spoke like this right now, at first I would perhaps fall asleep before you, but there would be the muddle of someone who would have trouble following me, and that is how one plays at it. If I provoke a rotation at the level of the permanent canals, well, there is a disconnection of the body image that can occur. You no doubt have… disconnections that happen when people are sent into space. When there is a disconnection, it is difficult to get going again.

And if one reaches sensory deprivation, which has been done — if you put subjects without mobility of the ear, without mobility of anything — well, you reach a disconnection. The disconnection, perhaps, if one is not careful enough, is total. Those who first began to do sensory deprivation, it was in Canada that it happened, by Central Europeans; all ended up in the psychiatric hospital. No one knew how to get them going again. There is a disconnection. After a couple of hours, the brain no longer has a simulation model and the electroencephalograms are already flattened.

After 20 minutes, one already has a very strong response. Personally, without going so far, I have happened to put water in the ears and then put earplugs over it so that it would make a certain condensation of the water. With just that, the EEG already flattens for the most part. The experiment that was done in Canada was different. People were put in a large pool so that the subject would be in a state of gravitation, a water temperature so that he would not lose heat — well studied — a tube so that he could breathe a little, and on top of that, goggles to hide visual stimulation. The three who had been taken for the trial by Stanley Jones’s groups ended up in psychiatric care, and no one knew how to wake them.

To wake them, one had to make an auditory stimulation again, a stimulation of the musculature, but they had been in deprivation. And this is very important. You know that at one point, isolation tanks were made so that people would attain seventh heaven, but the number of suicides there were was considerable. Now the tanks still exist, but music is put inside, so they are no longer tanks. You are better off in your bathtub listening to Mozart. But it is even a very violent reaction.

Not so very long ago, two or three years, one of my colleagues — I was working for other reasons on deep pathologies — worked with a Lyon team, notably on cancer. It is claimed that there are psychological elements in some, and my colleagues claimed that perhaps by putting people in tanks, one would manage to relieve their anguish. On the contrary, the anguish increases enormously. I duly asked them to be careful not to play with that, knowing well the effects of sensory deprivation. There were several of them, including a psychiatrist, who said that it no longer mattered, that he wanted to decide for himself. I told him to be careful.

The week after, he had killed himself. It is very dangerous. You have all gone, for trials, into an anechoic chamber. You can no longer do anything. You are in a state of suffocation. It is very, very, very unpleasant.

I think that the struggle against noise that we have envisaged has made us live in a lack of reverberation. We are in rooms that are too soundproofed. We need reverberation. We need not to overdo it in this phenomenon. We need acoustic responses in order to be alive at all times. The cell of Corti is the one that is going to make the organ of Corti work, which I have here diagrammed like this.

You saw it earlier. Roughly, it is the organ of Corti. If we look at it from the inside, here is how it presents itself. In the middle, there is the modiolus in which the ganglion of Corti will run, which will give the cochlear nerve, the apparatus more specialized for hearing, for the analysis of sounds, and you have here, at a given moment, the whole of the cochlea, which is contained in a bony structure hard as ivory, the bony cochlear apparatus. If one looks in more detail at that part, here it is. We have at the bottom a basal cell called the basilar.

You have here support cells, cells that are the ciliated cells we saw earlier, also embedded in a set of polysaccharides, always the same, with little inclusions. You have here an extremely muscularized zone, and you have there a very thin membrane that is Reissner’s membrane. The whole mechanics of the ear is supposed to be linked to fluids that would move in the upper part and that, by reaction, would make the basilar membrane move, which would excite the whole. That is surely false. It has always been thought that the ear was made in such a way that the sound entered the pinna, touched the eardrum, by the ossicular chain entered the inner ear, and there, it sorts itself out a bit however it likes. That is surely false.

There are so many impossibilities that one absolutely must find another solution. Otherwise one would not understand. This wave touches only a few cells and gives us so much precision when it descends. To come back to the ear we saw earlier, the middle ear, it is made, at a given moment, to carry the two muscles we saw earlier — never mind, here they are. The eardrum, at a given moment, which is here, is going to vibrate like a membrane, like a tuning fork. If you make a tuning fork live, you perhaps hear nothing.

If you touch a table at a given moment, the whole table starts to sing. If you touch a crystal glass, it starts to sing. If the eardrum begins to vibrate, the whole bone of the skull starts to sing. You have all applied something that vibrates against your skull, it starts to sing. From there, by bone conduction, everything is carried to the inner ear. The muscle of the hammer is made to regulate the tympanic tension and to choose to listen to what one wants.

If the sound is too weak, the plate that is there — the whole eardrum does not vibrate, only the lower part, a third of the lower part, will vibrate, like a membrane that resonates. And at that moment, the vibrating bone will send the information to the inner ear, which, thanks to the stapedius muscle, will act like a shock absorber. If there is too much noise, the shock absorber will act. And basically, all the waves we had seen — it is cited by Békésy notably, who had defended that theory — one excites the outer part of the bone. All that part will begin to expand, notably here, it is the bone. And there, one has at a given moment this membrane that will act like a Mecca membrane and that will excite the outer cells, then the inner ones afterward, but to the precise frequency.

In other words, the sound is going to touch the cochlea, a bit like a paraboloid of revolution that one drives into the noise. The low sounds settle on the one hand toward the lower part, toward the inferior part. You have at a given moment an iso-frequential analysis according to the parallels, like this one of the parabolic dome. And then you have, to increase the surface of analysis, an orange-peel cut of 2.5°, which is precisely what the cochlea does. There is an intersection of the iso-frequential analysis on the sides with the cochlear ramp, which is progressive and which is the site of excitation by the noises. Once you have that analysis, if the noise is very weak, it will act here, on the outer part, and one will have the perception of the noise.

If it is stronger, there will be here a rotation of the fluids, and if it is very, very strong — at the risk of bursting the tectorial membrane, which the too-loud noises cause — you have at a given moment an excitation such that there is here a whirlpool that forms, which will by reaction produce a play on the stapes footplate, which will immediately dampen the noise so that the ear is not destroyed. The more the stapes plays, the more it can play. For those who deal with ears, this explains a great deal. Let us take a fine analysis, almost frequency by frequency, in any case 3 per thousand, which is enormous. It also explains bone conduction. We have many ways to understand it.

In fact, we are bone-conduction animals, and thanks to the middle ear, man has managed to transform the aqueous, aquatic competence — what he heard in water at the start. The whole apparatus is also aquatic, and in the fluid it has the power to adapt the aerial impedances. And finally, another element that is important, it allows us to understand, apart from bone conduction, which takes on a meaning at a given moment — we are only bone-conduction animals — it also allows us to understand that we have so many possibilities of re-education, of modification, and also the masking effects. If you pass a very loud sound in the low frequencies, immediately the whole sound spectrum you were hearing disappears. On the contrary, the sound is very, very loud in the highs but with no lows, it dampens. We have no explanation of masking effects if we do not pass through a theory like this one.

It is a hypothesis I am putting forward. But it is true that if everyone gives his own, we will perhaps arrive at something. In any case, the current theories have put everyone in a dead end, and all the pupils of Békésy are stuck, notably von Pandorf. So, how does it happen at the level of the brain? Before reaching the brain, I take up again the cell of Corti — here it is. You know it well.

With here its nucleus, its mitochondria in mass, its cilia. And here, already, the destiny of this cell. I told you earlier that if it lost the mitochondria and left only the hair, one finds the feather and the hairs. These too are implanted foreign bodies. But if now one loses the hair and keeps the mitochondria and the nucleus, one is going to have all the sensory organs of the skin, of the muscles, and of the joints. In other words, man, I think — one sees here all the sensory apparatuses that one finds.

We shall see the main waves, and indeed man rises up always as wholly an ear. He is sensitive to everything, and any sound is going to touch not only the ear, but the whole body. Another element I bring you that is considerable as regards the ear, to show the importance it has, is that it is the first organ to complete itself. Here, we have the motor roots. These are the myelinations. When the brain begins to become functional.

And there, we are in intra-uterine life. The ear is completely finished at four and a half months of intra-uterine life. It becomes operational from the fifth month and a half; when one is born, and the cerebral area that corresponds to the ear is completed at birth. It is the only organ that is finished. But the whole acoustic apparatus that is going to come, here it is. It is finished well before.

Whereas there, it comes much later. The young people here — the brain completes itself entirely in its associative fibers at 42 years. As soon as one speaks of language, there is laterality. And laterality is a colossal, poorly defined problem. Almost all animals are bilateral once they have walked. But bilaterality does not for all that entail asymmetry.

Practically only the mammals are asymmetrical. The invertebrates are practically always symmetrical. There. It is true. If one takes an annelid, for example, one will see that there is no asymmetry. It is a characteristic.

There is something even more remarkable. Each slice, each metamere reproduces the other. But the invertebrate animals that are asymmetrical are the bivalves. You have a ganglion that represents the head. Here, the foot. And there, a visceral ganglion.

They are asymmetrical. It is the only case one can find. By contrast, when one looks here, the same: you have primitive crustaceans. You have here a caterpillar. We have animals that move head-on. There, the bee.

And there, the water worms. It is an important question. When did asymmetry begin? I think it began when the brain evolved, and notably with the reptiles. I give you roughly here a progression. At the top, you have a lamprey.

This one is the rhinencephalic part. It is olfaction that plays the largest role, as in fish. The brain is not very evolved. We are going to see an increase. That, that is a dogfish, a shark. There, we are going to arrive at the frog, the alligator.

In man, the brain is going to become more and more complex. We start again from the bottom. Here is man. And there, there is laterality. Laterality, I think, is a phenomenon of movement and of vision. The first to have occasion to move were, at a given moment, animals such as the serpent.

A serpent is obliged, at a given moment, to move forward. It is built a bit as we are limited beings. To move forward, it is obliged to go toward an object. If it sees this object, it can project it to the outside. We are going to take a vision of a lateral body. That will allow me to see better.

Let us suppose that this is the eye of a serpent. If I look straight ahead, suppose the object is there, the serpent is going to flood its two retinas in this way. We see here that this part will project. We are going to put the object here. We will see that the whole object will, at a given moment, flood its opposite brain, or as here, it will flood this part here, on both sides, and through that, the other half on the other side, and through the opposite. In other words, at that moment, to be able to act on the information arriving at this tubercle that is here, at the pulvinar, in the thalamus that is there, it will send the information to its cerebral image, and from there it sends information to the motor part that is here in order to be able to move.

In other words, each time there is an object, the animal is obliged to move opposite to what it is going to do. Automatically, there is a crossing of the motor bundle. I don’t know if I am making myself well understood: an animal cannot move in a straight line, it has seen something, it is obliged to move as a serpent does, by twisting. It is obliged to flex the side opposite to its vision. And there, there is at a given moment a laterality that occurs on the muscular plane. In other words, all that is practically motor is always non-lateralized, or very little.

By contrast, what is command is obliged to be automatized in order to be able to go toward the object. It is a very archaic thing that is going to demand a heap of training. But there is no differentiation. When one says laterality, there is none. There is simply an asymmetrical bilaterality of the system. And then, when we speak of ourselves, laterality, this means that immediately there is going to be a directionality on both sides.

At the level of the ear, when one enters into language, another laterality appears. Language imposes its presence on us and makes our body a set of three axes: one that establishes verticality, another that makes left-right, and a third that makes the postero-anterior axis. And at that moment, one is obliged to have one side that is going to differentiate itself. And notably in language, it is always the right side. The right ear is the leading ear. And from time to time, the left ear can take over the dominance, but it is never for all that the leading one.

One of the examples I can give you: if you take a left-hander, however confirmed he may be, if you play upon his right ear, if you teach him to position himself with the right ear, he is going to switch over quickly and he will become right-handed. So there is no left-hander. It was thought that the brain was, at a given moment, used on one side. It could be inverted in left-handers. No, it is poorly used in the left-hander. There is an enormous loss of compensation that occurs.

But if you teach a left-hander to perceive only on the right side, he is going to tip over, and he will have an enormous facilitation in his engagement, in his memory, in his concentration, and in his creativity. A left-hander risks being blocked from time to time at that level, and above all in verbalization. The fact… There are a few animals. There are some that are lateralized, notably the canaries. The canary is lateralized for singing.

They are obliged to monitor themselves. Contrary to us, the left ear is dominant. It takes the homolateral voices. It has no larynx. It sings with the bifurcation. There is the bifurcation between the two bronchi.

Its whistle will allow it to monitor itself. But it is obliged to. If you make it deaf, it can no longer sing. And animals of the type… the frog we saw earlier has no laterality. Yet it sings.

But it has, for its part, an obligation, which is to sing at a constant temperature. If you put it at 18 degrees, it sings all year round. But its ear does not allow it to. The ear is very, very fragile because it is peripheral. Whereas the human ear is very deep, extremely vascularized so as always to have the same temperature. The frog is dependent on heat.

It will sing only in summer. But once again, in your bathroom, it will sing all year round. Language was located on the brain for the first time in 1861 by Broca. Before him, it was indeed thought that the brain had something to do with it, but it was not very well defined. Broca had in his ward — he was a young surgeon at Bicêtre — and Broca, around April 15, 1861, had a case come to him, a hemiplegic who had lost language. But he had been hemiplegic for a long time, and thus without language for a long time.

He did not come because he was hemiplegic, since Broca himself was a surgeon, but it was the medical ward that had sent him. He had arrived with an abscess, a total gangrene. It was a disease that no longer exists thanks to antibiotics, but in short the fellow had an abscess from one end of the body to the other, on the right side. What struck Broca, who was a fantastic clinician, was that this subject did not suffer. So there was a damage to the sensory bundles. On the mechanical side, he could do nothing, since the patient died three days later.

But he had the time to examine him, and above all the time to try to see what was there on the plane of language. It is astonishing that the doctors who had seen him before had not thought of this. He began to question him, and he realized that this fellow understood, but that he was unable to express himself. Except when he was very angry. He said only one thing, he said the name of God, the name of God; he did not know how to be angry, that is all he could draw out of him. He opened his skull.

He introduced anatomopathology, which did not exist before him, and he realized that this subject had a lesion in a zone that was there, here, and that has since been called Broca’s area. He had seen that it was the area of language. That area was further defined. At present, we know it well. It is the area where, thanks to Penfield, all that area is set down: the muscles of the larynx, the muscles of the tongue, all the muscles of the face, in which there are the two muscles of the ear, a horse, the thumb-index of the right hand, the other fingers, here you have the arm, here you have the trunk, and behind, the leg.

The whole part of muscular command is found at that level. Once again, there is no reflection upon our brain, whereas Broca tried to think that the lesion must be on the left side, and he thought of the crossed system. It is not so old, really. His idea was to try to find a left-hander who would present the image on the other side. And all his life, he searched. In 1863, he published other cases, five complementary cases, and in 1865, eight complementary cases.

It raised, at a given moment, a whole storm. Because for about a hundred years — not quite, 70 years — there was no intelligent reflection on the brain. Above all since 1808, Gall had spoken of language, notably of the bumps on the skull, because you remember phrenology. Gall is an Austrian who had found that the skull had localizations in the brain, but was perhaps a bit excessive in finding that this thing was a certain zone, and there remains of him only the bump of mathematics, if you like. Thinking that at a given moment what was inside must play upon the outside. It is interesting; if one day you have the chance to find Gall’s brains, you should read them.

He was readable, because he found everything, but he always found things that are rather funny. And I think he believes he has found everything because he hides his sources. The ancients, in Mosaic philosophy, already knew how to recognize a skull, already knew the tendencies, 7,000 years ago all the same, and so I think he found the sources there, but that he concealed them. What is interesting, for example, is that all singers have a ridge here, very, very pronounced, in that angle, at the supraorbital. In all the great musicians, you have the same ridge. He made a heap of correlations like those, which are always amusing to see, it existed.

I was always told that everyone in France was up in arms, because he was chased out at a given moment of Austria because of his ideas. He came to France, and he set forth the expression that Bertier had brought as a solution, and a very, very great physician who had been able to sell what he was doing, named Bouillaud at the time — Bouillaud thought it was a brilliant idea and wanted to defend it. Bouillaud nearly lost his position, everyone was fighting, until the moment when Broca brought up this affair which made everything come back out. It was not a done deal. Immediately, there was Trousseau, who at the time was the great physician of the same standing as Broca, and what he had called aphemia, not aphasia. He found that the name was improper, and so he called it aphasia.

For him, it was not a mechanical disease, it was essentially a disease of impaired intelligence. For him, it was someone who had lost his intelligence and no longer expressed himself. To this day, people fight over whether it is mechanical or not; we are still more or less there. Trousseau’s followers were notably Fleury, Hock, and above all Finkenburg, who took to thinking that aphasia was only a symbolic disease, that is to say that the subject was no longer capable of applying linguistically the word to the symbol. By contrast, the people who were on Broca’s side, and notably the English, Charlton Bastian — Charlton Bastian was a fantastic man who discovered everything that was in the brain without ever opening a single one. By clinical observation alone, he managed to see that it was the zones that had there a very important zone, here, underlying, it was the zone onto which auditory memory must project.

And he made it even more than auditory memory, he made it the zone of naming memory. In other words, nothing could be named, nothing can be retained that does not pass through that zone. Later, we got a bit further, knowing that there were three zones, one that is central, here; another, where one recognizes the zones — they must already have been stored; and a third, here, much more important, deliberately red, motor, here, the reserve zone of words. This reserve of words is interesting because that zone is going to project onto the whole body. Memory is not in the brain, it is in the whole body, but at the time, no one knew anything about it. Each time you set something down, each time you associate a movement with language, you feel it considerably.

There is a total junction of the whole body. And one thing that is interesting too, in that zone — I take it up again. If you read the ancients, you will see that in Aristotle, you find yourself, after Cicero, when he gives all the keys to speaking well, all the keys to being at ease, he shows all the time the movement one must make with the hand, the right hand, but the left — you have at a given moment always a symbolism that is going to be associated, and for Cicero it is unthinkable that a subject should speak with nothing, a paper in hand. He absolutely had to have integrated everything, and he shows well that at a given moment, even what he calls the vultus, the vultus which is the mobility of the whole face. The face must have at a given moment a whole approach. We, we do only that.

When one watches how a subject is going to speak, one watches which ear he offers us, how one is going to spar with him with his right ear, and which is the side of the face that is going to play. You know that good speakers speak with the right side. You all have two ears, two eyes, and two nostrils, but you have two mouths, in case you may have forgotten. Well, good speakers speak with the ear. The right mouth, whereas bad speakers are going to pass over to the other side. And when you hesitate, well, you fumble between the two, hence the elements that appear, or hence, at a given moment, the difficulties.

And another thing that is important: in that zone close to the face, you see, the thumb and the index of the right hand. And when you want to speak, when you want, at a given moment, to increase your voice, your potential, when you have to retain things, read while putting your hand there as if there were a microphone. Your voice is going to light up. The lips lengthen just a tiny bit. It is precisely a feedback and a memory that increases considerably. Each time you are going to learn something, say it two or three times aloud and you will have it stored.

It is not a phenomenon of reverberation. If you put your left hand, it does not work. On the contrary, it is worse. If you put on a glove, it does not work. It really is a phenomenon of cutaneous reflex, without doubt. Another thing that is important too: we have a tiny zone, which is the zone of the trunk.

We have an enormous notion of the face, an enormous notion of the visage, of the thumb, the index finger, it is important, it is all of writing. We have the arm, which is well informed, but the back — if I asked each of you here to draw your back, well, you have lived with it for a long time, are you capable of seeing yourself from behind? The back, we do not know. We have no reference for it. Men are going to do yoga, children gymnastics, they are going to do anything at all, but everyone has back pain because of this. We do not know how to manage that information.

I can give you an idea, if you like, to be able to manage it, it is easy. What holds the two shoulders is the whole musculature that goes to attach itself, at a given moment, in the lower part toward the sacrum. You have all the dorsal muscles that hold like that. There is a kind of triangle that makes it so that, at a given moment, if you already think of that triangle, you will be fairly straight. You will already have the good fortune of having a notion of the rear. A second triangle that makes it so that the two hips that are here, well, remember that they are held by a whole musculature that goes to attach itself, at a given moment, to the occipital protuberance.

The intervention of these two triangles, which is something very strongly symbolic, well, shows us precisely that there is, at a given moment, an integration of an image within oneself, and your back stands a good chance of straightening up. To return — 1863, 1854, pupils too — so there is Charlton Bastian, and then afterward, the Germans, Kussmaul and Wernicke. Wernicke found that that zone was the zone of deafness. Basically, now that we have more hindsight, we know that there are as many problems of aphasia as there are cases and individuals, it is much more complex. And there, one looked at the zones, formerly on the surface; now we know that there are subcortical zones, there are all the levels, one can have a thousand forms of difficulty. By contrast — and here I answer questions that have been put to me — I was asked whether one has an action on such things.

Well, a brain is the owner of 15 billion cells. These 15 billion cells, each one of them, it appears, thanks to these chains of DNA, would be capable of integrating the universe. You see what we have amassed, 15 billion cells, not much. Which means that we do not at all use our potential in its entirety. When there is an accident such as an aphasia, well, one might think that, at a given moment, judging by the clinical picture, half the brain is lost. Indeed, there is half the body that no longer moves, there is the language that is gone, and one might think that everything is involved.

When you reactivate them, when you set them going, well, you have surprises. We came to see a great deal of the hemiplegic, and formerly one saw many of them because the hospitals did not deal with them. Now they have dealt with them for about twenty years, doing not much, one finds them again out in the world, and we have an enormous action. When one sets an aphasia going, however blocked, however hemiplegic with enormous contractures, the first thing, the musculature resumes its course with the pains of being re-inhabited — one re-inhabits this body, and one sees the eyes set off again, and something will remain. A lesion remains, but really the definitive lesion. It is perhaps a lesion that is there, perhaps another that is here, but all the rest recovers.

I think that when there is a cerebral storm as strong as that of a hemiplegia, well, it is true that the body remains frozen, it is true that there is something, but it is true that there is a revolution somewhere, but all the rest remains frozen. If there were the revolution named in Paris, even in Marseille one would no doubt be, at a given moment, a bit stunned. Well, it is the same: if one sets going again everything that has been frozen, one sees all the systems set off again, and one can often have recoveries, even on the plane of language. There are things that are hidden, there are things that will never be pronounced, but there are interventions on the psychological plane, and the further I go, I am convinced that aphasia in particular is a problem of psychology. Poor Broca was the victim of his discovery, since people set upon him sixteen-fold, notably Pierre Marie, only too eager to find that he was wrong, and that brain of Leborgne, the one I mentioned to you earlier, his first patient, was at a given moment deposited at the faculty of medicine, was at a given moment taken back out of its jar, cut into little slices, to show that Broca was wrong. Poor Broca, she is dead.

It is of no use to have discoveries of that type. But, all the same — and yet someone had tried to bring people into agreement, and you will see, in language, it runs on. It is a man named Baillarger. Baillarger, while everyone was fighting, Trousseau on one side and good Broca on the other, at the Société d’anthropologie and at the École d’anthropologie, there was Broca’s chair. I give you a detail that I lived through: one day I gave a lecture, in this course, and I had a very small lecture hall, it is after all very specialized, and I dealt with the right and the left. And I had a full lecture hall.

I puffed out my chest a little, I thought it was due to my notoriety, and then at the end, when I asked questions, I was asked only political questions, I understood absolutely nothing, and I had no idea that I had stirred up such a thorn. And the funniest thing is that people came to be treated, so I had a certain resonance. Well, Baillarger let drop this extraordinary thing. He tried to show that Trousseau, who claimed that man was less intelligent, and that he therefore had a bit of the possibility of speaking, and that Broca was essentially a mechanist, with Wernicke and company — well, between the two, he tried to show that they were both wrong, but both right. But neither held extreme positions, it is just that they could not get along. But he spoke of one thing, saying that each human animal starts, at a given moment, automatizing, and is going to go toward consciousnesses of gestures that are more and more elaborate.

And just as he starts from archaic memories, he is going to go toward memories that are more and more recent. And at a given moment, if there were an accident, an incident, there was regression of the phenomenon. And good Baillarger, he was taken away in his prime, no one listened to him. It is funny that twenty years later, Jackson, who is the master of modern psychiatry — Jackson, for twenty years, tried to speak of the same thing — one had to wait until 1913 for Head and Pick to begin to speak of the phenomena and to show what regression is. Regression is someone who, at a given moment, loses his functions and falls back into automatisms, which certain psychiatric patients often do, or the unfortunate ones we now see stuffed with substances like automatons, because they take such a product that disconnects them entirely, the brain no longer works, they become good anthropoids, a bit improved, but who retain no more. And at a given moment, he is ambulant; language is going to set itself down here, with this.

We are going to take up that zone again, amplifying it a little. We have, then, three zones. Here, the zone where the sounds arrive. Here, a second zone, that of the recognition of sounds. And there, that of memory. Naming memory, which has this particularity.

It is that the anterior part here is claimed to be the memory of music. Personally, I think the whole area is that of music. But it was sought to dissociate, and it is still sought, to dissociate music from language. Now, each language is a music. And so much information has passed in there that when one stimulates those regions, it is certain that words come out. But that zone has not yet invaded everything, that is why a bit of music comes out at that level.

But underneath, it is certain that a word is already a music. It is so strong, a music — if you take an English word, for example, in this tonality, there is already the whole language in it. The English sentence is already inside. There is a whole system of development. Each language is going to, at a given moment, telescope out things that are already integrated. How do we go about trying to integrate languages?

Well, there are two means. First, to know the different uses of an ear. An ear has three possibilities. It has 11 octaves in all, from 16 cycles to 16,000, roughly. A little detail I give you, since you are in aviation, which I was before you, I am the elder. I had at the arsenals a laboratory assistant who was exceptional.

He heard up to 27,000 cycles. He thought himself somebody. And he was all the more curious in that he replaced all my analysis instruments, because he would tell me, look, there’s a 12,042 just coming through. Ah, that’s a sign of 44. He was a bit of a pain. But he was as musical as a frying pan.

It is interesting, he had an ear more than absolute, more amusical. In other words, music is something else. Music has nothing to do with the possibility of the so-called absolute ear. I see many people who suffer and who go to be treated in every corner of the world to have absolute pitch. It is of no use. In language, it is of no use either.

Absolute pitch — someone who is a musician, so much the better, he knows whether everything starts off right. But what is important for being a musician is the chord. In linguistics, it is interesting. Each phoneme is a chord. They are struck chords that make it so that one knows from them the music of each language. Each language is characterized by a passband.

The Slavs have 11 octaves at their disposal. It is therefore with the same brain, with their 15 billion, with the same intelligence, that they have the good fortune of having a very open diaphragm and of integrating all the phonemes that come to them. They have another good fortune, which is that to set oneself to listen, which demands a latency time — when I set myself to listen, I am obliged to strain my ear. There is no longer just the hammer, there is a whole system that is not the same in all the places of the world. And I think that there is perhaps a phenomenon that must be, for its part, genetic. The times can vary from 5 milliseconds to 175 milliseconds.

The longest I have seen are seven Slavs, they have 175 milliseconds plus 11 octaves. That is to say, they have all the time to do the analysis. The more time one has to analyze and the more the field is open, the further one can go. By contrast, a Spaniard who has only octaves in the lower part, who has, on top of that, a very, very short time of 5 milliseconds — well, he does not have time to do much analysis. Everything is sibilant, you cannot remember it. If you take a Spanish sibilant, it is very heavy.

They have trouble perceiving it. And if you take, for example, words like — I always take this because they are easy to do — take the word fig. Look at how, in French, one pronounces it. Fig, it is very long. The i is long. The gue is long.

The f is long. If I pronounce it in English, it is that there, in the high frequencies, it goes from 2,000 up to 15,000, but with a very short latency time. So it is an f that passes here. The f’s pass there. The f, the gue, the che pass from here. And English is going to distinguish everything, everything toward the high frequencies all the time.

If you take, then, the word fig, one is going to hear it fig. The f is very short and everything is abraded. If you have a Spaniard who hears only in those zones, well, this one disappears. He knows that there was a sibilant. And he is going to bring out an h for you. A son.

At a given moment, a displacement of the system. And he cannot do it. Another element: you take a French word. That one too is easy to do in the laboratory. You take the word tonnelle. Tonnelle in French.

If you pass it through an English filter, the t is going to become almost sibilant. I don’t know if you have in your ear the Canadians, when they speak French, they whistle. Une tonnelle. Well, they, they will end up saying tuner. Because the o, that deforms by dint of the pressure on the t. And when you pass it back the other way, almost surely, you are going to find the word tunnel.

Two or three times out of a hundred, you find tonnelle again. The word tonnelle is a word that passed into English and that came back to us. With that approach, one understands very well all the linguistic mutations. The consonant mutations. The consonant mutations were examined in 1922 by Grimm. They had been discovered in 1814 by Rask, and by Bradford in 1818.

But those two had written in Danish, so it was personalized. It was discovered that they had no English version until 50 years later. In fact, these are Grimm’s laws. But Grimm’s laws are inexplicable. How is it that a p becomes a t or a d? How does one come there with the filters?

Well, we have differences. What mobilizes the filters? There is only a genetic factor. The strongest factor in the filter is the place of acoustic impedance of the corners of the world. You who go off to wander, since now I will do so in space — well, if you go off to wander in Marseille, you will not have the same auditory, acoustic atmosphere as you will have in southern Spain or as you will have in England. It is easy to speak English in England, harder to speak in southern Spain.

There is the medium that allows me to join you. Of course, my larynx is your ear. But it is above all the air between the two of us. If there were, at a given moment, no air, I would have trouble getting through. But if the room were deadened a bit more, you would have more trouble straining your ear and there would already be a disconnection, and my voice would have a great deal of trouble getting through. If you enter a reverberant room, you feel more like singing.

In your bathroom, it is more of a romance. At a given moment, the reverberation is going to play on that side. The acoustic phenomenon is all the more marked in that the sounds come back to us only with difficulty. We need a richness in the high frequencies here, in order to have roughly the control of what we say. If we go off into the lower part, it is much harder. You know that when you speak, you let loose into the world sounds whose spectrum is fairly wide.

All the high frequencies go off in a straight line. The mid-range go off a bit to the sides, and you receive only the lows. Which means that, first, as you speak, if you speak badly, you make yourself deaf. If we lose the notion of the high frequencies, you listen only to the lows. If you do not listen to your voice, it is because suddenly you have cut off the lows that go off to the sides and you hear only the highs. There is a voice that one always finds a bit nasal, twangy.

And then, it also explains to you that in a reverberant room, you have more tone, and you feel like singing. There, I thank you for your listening. I do not believe it is entirely genetic. But you will not prevent the places of the world from changing. Babelism is obligatory. Esperanto and your idea, it’s zero.

And they often send me a tape. I answer them, very good, but you are from Romania. The Esperanto is already not the same. At the Council, all the Benedictines of the world, when they were asked which language they understood for communicating, they said, we, it’s all the same to us, we speak Latin. When they found themselves in Rome, no one understood one another. The Latin spoken by a German or spoken by an American, these are different languages.

It is what is happening to English now. Take a Japanese who speaks English, and you will be on another planet. There are difficulties, but one cannot make a language stay put. The American who went to America, just like the Frenchman who went to America — if one makes the analysis, if one manages to write everything down, one is going to find the same modulation as the Indian who was there before. I think it is an enormous influence. Earlier, I had spoken to you of the muscles and of the tensors.

The tension of the tensors is not the same. The Englishman, then, this ear, has a more median ear. There are advantages to that; the Amerindians, they have a much broader face. The second generation of Americans takes on the same face, the same look. If you pull hard at the width, the face changes. All the other muscles of the face are extremely mobile.

Nature is overabundant, notably the inner ear. It has many more cells than one will have later. By contrast, the ear will require that you take great care. In the inner ear, we have 15 billion cells at the start. We have only a few cells in the low frequencies. If one day you sing, you do not always come in very true in the lows.

It is difficult to perceive. We have only 100 cells. In the mid-range, we have 500. And in the high frequencies, we have 24,000. Unfortunately, as soon as you make noise, that is where you break everything. If you perceive the high frequencies well, you have the good fortune of having verticality.

What gives you bearing, that’s all. There are unfortunate people who no longer use that zone. You put someone out to pasture prematurely, he no longer speaks, he loses communication, he very quickly has ears like washed-out things, and he loses his potential. But if he no longer has his ear, he is no longer going to stimulate his brain. The brain, look how it lights up. It lights up from the start.

It goes extremely fast. If one knows how to use it, to read aloud, to do what I was telling you — if one neglects it, it loses weight. It loses 200 grams between 40 and 60 years. One should not be saddened. But if one uses what remains, it is not too bad. If you always formulate aloud what you have to learn, you will have as much memory as you want.

But one must always have the courage to write aloud. At present, we manufacture battalions of people who will have no ears. We oblige people to read in silence from the outset. It is absolutely aberrant. They do not use that zone and will not have the good fortune of storing many things. They will be tired and easily fatigued.

A drawback is that the word “to read,” lire, comes from legere in Latin. That is to say, to harvest by the ears. The ancients knew everything. To read is necessarily aloud. The moment you begin, not everything is worth being read. When you read a book, it is not worth retaining.

The moment you have a point to retain, you say it aloud. What we do is to say it in silence in order to go fast. But each time they have something to retain, we ask them to say it to themselves aloud. They say it once or twice, and it is stored. It is better to put it in one’s brain than in a file that one never looks at. It is to maintain it, it does not degrade.

One thing that is interesting: it was thought that memory goes away, which is apparently true, but it is never the memory zones that go away, it is the connections that go from one center to another, one can even photograph them. The CNRS brought out something fascinating. One sees someone who starts again, one sees the fibers that re-form, the connections that re-make themselves. We re-make the connections. So at all times, one must nonetheless set oneself going. It takes a lot of courage.

It takes a lot of courage to listen, but it takes a lot to be happy. It is dramatic, it is absolutely dramatic. It is even worse than the loop that wears down. It is worse than the drug. It is not for one reason alone. The stapedius muscle is a small, fragile muscle.

If one puts a Walkman on the head, which has bad curves to begin with — if one wanted to have an earphone that matched the good curve of the ear, it would cost more than the device, than the Walkman. Secondly, one can listen to it a little, but not all the time. We have unfortunate children who listen to it louder and louder, and at a given moment, they become more and more deaf. A third of the young people who present at the conscription board are deaf. It is enormous. There is nothing to be done.

They have given up that zone, it is unrecoverable. They listen 5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 hours. Television, too, passes in very bad zones. If one listens to television too long, one enters the range of television and it is bad. French, of course — the fundamental sound is always low. It is below, around 300.

French has a passband between 1,000 and 2,000. English also has the band low down. It is always the laryngeal that does everything. But it is going to draw from 2,000 up. So it is going to distinguish everything. The closer a language is to the laryngeal sound, the more it stays what it was.

Spanish, you can read its written form. You know Spanish. There is hardly any change. If you read English, you are going to take a good dictionary. And as we do, we already take the Song of Roland. There is an enormous change that occurs.

There is a slippage. Spanish stayed with its language. It has 45,000 words. Spanish has 65,000. French has 35,000. There are 360,000 in English.

English is going to absorb words to the point of the unpronounceable. When it tells them to you, it is going to draw from elsewhere and it is obliged to renew itself. Up to 15,000. The sibilants go up to 15,000. It is the only one. By contrast, there is one thing that is interesting.

That zone, to tell you to what point one must read aloud, it can become stronger and stronger by healing. It is that if you put an excitation on the brain — this was done also while people were fighting over knowing the cerebral zones, around 1870, who found this phenomenon. I found them brilliant at first. But afterward, I learned what they were doing. I was a bit more irritated by what they had done. But in short, they had taken brains.

They had taken prisoners of war. I learned that later. What they had done is interesting, they excited the brain with a few microvolts. And the whole brain is flooded by these microvolts. It passes everywhere, except that zone. And if one wants to pass from one zone to another, if one makes a section here, one is going to see the rim of the brain with three stages each time.

These three stages demand a great deal of intensity to pass from one to the other. That is why one must read really very loud. One must really strain the ear. To answer also your question earlier, the good fortune is that we should know how to make the ear work again as it was in the womb. That is where it is most open, that is where it works hardest, that is where it is easiest. That is where we have the fetus.

And if one gives people back fetal hearing, everything sets off again and one sets many things going. What is funny, when you take fetal hearing in languages, one makes someone hear as he would have heard had he been in the fetal state, whether English or the rest. One is going to see that the language is characterized by top top top or top top top, it depends on the languages. It is a bit like Morse code. It is not the same Morse in English, in French, or otherwise. And when you pass that for a certain time, he does not yet have the language, but he has integrated the music of the language.

Once he is accustomed at the end of it all — it lasts only a day, it is going to be extremely fast to be sensitized. Then one passes him the hearing, unrolling more and more, and he finds himself with words he knows how to decode. Even if he does not understand, he has the good fortune of seeing the cadences, the words that follow, and so on. If he has some background beforehand, he decodes everything. Above all when he has spoken of it, he speaks like the Englishman or the American, when we see people who are obliged more and more to go abroad. They came to do internships, but with a big background.

They are technicians who live the language well. One speaks to them, they are dead. But when they come back after their internship, they always come to tell me that they are satisfied, that they were able to speak the language and to receive it. Japanese is a band that is limited. It is limited here and demands another total bodily image. It is an image in width, when one sees their face.

A Japanese is going to move his body all the time differently. He speaks all the time like that. And he walks like that. In a whole bodily image, speaking Japanese is the Japanese dynamic. If you pass it with filters, you immediately find a contradiction, not through the cochlea, but through the vestibule. Each time one delivers, it is the vestibule that reacts to give the body image in the Japanese way.

It is an ascending slope that is very much hooked onto the nose. It is permanently so. Chinese and Vietnamese. There are 16 tones in Vietnamese. There are between 5 and 9 in Chinese. But by desensitizing, it is the same thing.

The ear is capable of hearing everything. I had the good fortune to experience something. One must understand what must happen. I had the good fortune to see many Portuguese. I did not understand Portuguese a few years ago. And I worked a great deal with Portuguese linguists.

Notably one of my fellows who worked at my place and who was the lector at the cathedral. And when he then left for Mozambique, instead of writing to me, he sent me cassettes. It was difficult for me to decode them. And I passed these cassettes through Spanish curves. And I decoded exactly everything. Portuguese is Spanish spoken with a Russian ear.

They have 11 octaves open. You have a very open ear among the Catalans. The Catalans learn Portuguese very well. Indeed. By contrast, when a Russian hears Portuguese being spoken, he stops short. It is not the same language.

And vice versa. It is difficult to see with what ease the Portuguese learn languages. It is very difficult, that ear. But I can give you a key if it amuses you. It is not I who bring it to you, it is Caruso. Caruso, who had the golden voice one can imagine, which is fabulous through the recordings that were made by the poor recordings of the time.

Well, I have never found a singer who climbs higher than his voice, despite the recordings of the time. Caruso was a baritone with a tenor timbre who had the good fortune at a given moment of being engaged everywhere. But he could practically not get out of Italy because he had nothing at all in the voice. He was a baritone, but he climbed up to B-flat, B-natural. And when he managed finally to get onto the stage, he got there because he forced his way past a doorkeeper at a Neapolitan theater where he happened to be playing. There was a good composer who was wearing himself out with a tenor who was worthless.

And Caruso slipped in and let loose a few sounds in the wings. He had peculiarities, so as to see who it was. Now, his man was Puccini, and what they had tried to make this man sing was La Bohème. When he heard this voice of Caruso — he had even had a lawsuit with his tenor whom he had thrown out — he asked Caruso to sing. But Caruso was obliged to say that he could not sing the high notes that were in it. There were in La Bohème, if you know the score, two high notes.

Well, by Puccini’s own hand, it was transposed. It was a dotted thing. After having sung that, Caruso was invited to sing, hitting all the notes. And I think one had to know why one accepts that in Italy. It is absolutely intolerable. But his voice was such that one fine day, he was sent to America to sing at the Met.

The contract was fantastic. He did not dare refuse it, but it was not for all that within his reach. And while the others were busy basking in the sun during the crossing by boat, he was in his cabin trying to do all the high notes he could that he never gave. I don’t know if he put it in an ear that he had not put the sheet away. But one fine day, still in his cabin, he was relieving himself when the boat began to sound its horn. And he said to himself, my God, now’s the moment to do the high notes and to try at full voice.

And, I apologize for the expression, he let loose all the high notes he wanted. And he had found the neurology of the two systems. When you read fast, you will do the same. We have two nerves. They are asymmetrical. It is the tenth cranial pair.

The tenth cranial pair, in passing, here, the ear, the external part, it innervates the eardrum and the sensitivity of the stapedius muscle. That is why with a word, you can wound so much. There are enormous resonances that can play upon everything. And this nerve is very important. By itself, it is practically the whole parasympathetic. It is the one that ought to work in parallel and in fact it is almost always in opposition.

It is because its nerve is polluted in a heap of stories that the sympathetic no longer works. It innervates by anastomosis with the ninth pair. It innervates the Eustachian tube and the pharynx. When a child does not want to go to class, when he has a few apprehensions, he gets a sore throat. If it is on the right, it bothers Papa; on the left, it bothers Mama. You have then with the eleventh pair, a child who holds himself like that.

They all have a drop of the gaze toward the boy at the moment of puberty. For a year, he does nothing in class. He has a drop of an octave and his voice is going to break because he hears an octave lower. You have then here the sensory innervation of the larynx. Which gives you fewer emotions, the lump that rises and descends. You have the motor part of the larynx.

You have then the esophagus — the one who does not have an easy dialectic with his mother. She can give him the bottle. He is going to vomit each time. The more he vomits, the more she gives him to eat. It innervates the bronchi. It is the father of asthma.

It innervates here on the right the coronary. The infarction succeeds an angina pectoris. In the throat. It ends here. It throws itself into the stomach. And then, it ends by throwing itself into the left.

The left will do the same, except at the level of the larynx, where the nerve is going to go much lower. Here it is under the subclavian, there it is under the aorta. That is why the language that starts off is always two-toned. Papa, pipi, popo, and so on. When a dog barks, it is wow-wow. One has to be an old dog to do just wow-wow.

But it is linked to that. It is two differences of route. This one is going to innervate all the elements. The intestine, the large colon, everything. And the anus. The larynx, right away.

In yoga, it is what one learns to do. When a subject wants to reach the strongest relaxation, there are always two things that are contracted, the anus and the larynx. To let go, there is the tongue. One should not try to slump in order to make sure of it, but in letting go the anus, everything lets go. In South Africa, I treated the greatest singer of South Africa, who was a great baritone. When I got him into shape, he would tell me, first rule, first pair of underpants.

Second rule, second pair of underpants. But the great singers, formerly, always gave themselves a healthy enema. And besides, you have an intelligent body. When there is an important matter at hand, you have a stronger flow and you have a release that is linked to that. But it is important. You will see in the state of stress, in the state of conflict, you will see how tight it is at that level.

And how cornered you are up above. Now you have the key to rapid reading, but it is true that it works well. It is the mother who passes in the first stage. It is the sea — the mère, the mer — that one hears. Well, she allows the fetus to hear. And when I did all that in 1952–1953, it was a bit unusual.

It was the kind of thing that came down on my head. Now, everyone wants her to hear, that she is low-pitched, that she has the father’s voice. The abdominal wall, it defends the fetus. It is by bone conduction, it is by the vertebral column of the mother that the fetus is informed. I think that is why at the end of her pregnancy, she is going to plunge the head, its pelvic crown as a crown in order to be able to perceive and to have a dynamic with the mother. So it is she who plays.

By contrast, if the mother is German and the father is French, I ask each one to speak his own language. Because the child has the notion of the two channels right away. And if they live in America, the child will learn American just as well in school. But each of the parents must speak his language of origin because he speaks it to perfection. And if they want to help the child by trying to ease things by speaking the language of the wife or of the husband, the child is going to confuse the two channels and he will be bad in both languages. The Hebrew language is a special language.

And when, a good 30 or 40 years ago, I realized that there was in each letter an energy. And I maintained that it played upon the body in its entirety. And notably, for example, the relation of the letter to the body is important. If you take a child who begins to read, as a rule, he is of small stature, you give him large letters. He proceeds like that. He can therefore project onto his occipital area that image, which is going to re-project onto his body.

If, by contrast, he was not able to learn to read, he will have the disadvantage of growing up with letters that become smaller and smaller. So I was convinced that the letters had a projection onto the body. And with Carlos Suarès — before Carlos Suarès — I had taken photographs and I had asked someone who speaks Hebrew well to be willing, at a given moment, to help me to pronounce it as it should be. And I had the good fortune to come upon a rabbi who could recite his Kabbalah as he wished. And he began to enunciate to me, Aleph, Aleph, Aleph. It begins like that.

And he sat down right away because he saw, on the cathode tube, the Aleph just as he had pronounced it. It is interesting, so I was quite right. It was a sensory imagery that he must have… Did he feel it through the skin, through the body, through anything at all? He had reproduced what he was reading. And my good rabbi did not want to go further because I was diabolical, I had found a device that decrypted it, and I cannot say more.

Until the moment when I saw Carlos Suarès, who had been a Kabbalist, but who had found this element that I had announced, and who came to see whether one could go further. So he had a disadvantage, which is that he himself was not from Israel, he was Egyptian, so with an accent. But he set himself going, and the most interesting thing is that when he began to pronounce his letters, one had the Aleph, one found the same thing, a bit less beautiful, because he had an accent. It goes much further than our ear can determine. But when he pronounced the Beit, the second letter, there was something very curious. Fortunately, there were several of us, I was even able to photograph it, there were five of us.

There was his wife, there was my wife, there was a laboratory assistant, and Carlos Suarès. When he said the Beit, his photograph came out on the cathode tube. During the Kabbalah, what is strange, especially as they are not accustomed to the Kabbalah, is that it is the lateral explanation of the Pentateuch, of the first book of the Bible. The Kabbalah is better than what is achieved by a man who reaches a certain plane. When he says a Beit, it is his own image that he projects. The Beit means the opening, the mouth, everything.

He too made it so that I encouraged him to go all the way. I no longer wanted to advance at all. I took all the photographs. Since then, I have worked a great deal on energy. What interests me to see is that basically, at every moment, they are energies that have a value that is also symbolic. I think that the greatest linguistic book one will never set aside is the Bible.

It is everything. The musical ear is a perfect ear. It is that ear, with an ascending curve of 6 decibels per octave. If it is a bit more pronounced like that, I will be a tenor, or a violinist. A bit between the two, I am going to be a cellist or a baritone. And if I am here, I am a bass.

But one needs at least this ascent. If here I have a deficiency, I am going to sing off-key. I love music, but one sings off-key and one sings ugly. The point is that this is linked to muscles, to the tensors, to the muscle of the hammer and to the stapedius muscles. That zone, it is the hammer. This one, it is the stapes.

By re-educating the two, one allows people to hear true and to reproduce true. Once again, the memory that is going to be lost in that region must at all times be maintained. You cannot put memory in well if you do not all the time set yourself going. I can give you an example that I am living: a friend who was in Normandy, 85 years old. He has an absolutely phenomenal memory. And it amuses me to see how he maintains it.

He is fairly aged, he lives about forty kilometers from us, and I go to fetch him practically every Sunday because he was very, very ill. I think one is a great help in going to see him, bringing him back. He comes to eat with us, I make the round trip. Each time I make the round trip, every 40 meters, he tells me, look, that’s so-and-so’s cabin. But when you are alone, think of your voice. I think the ideal is that you should not continue to learn a single language, but all the languages of Europe.

It is much easier than you think. The first language is difficult, the second becomes very easy, and after that you speak languages as you wish. One must have the courage to speak badly. That is the key I can give you. My language of origin is Italian. I spoke Niçois and Italian until the age of 11.

I arrived in Paris, I did not speak. One thing that saved me, I had a kind of predilection for reading aloud. I remember still shouting the few things in French that I had to do, in my bathroom and in the kitchen. I had to try to integrate them. Afterward I did like all the others, I tried to learn English, without much success. And then I lost Italian, basing myself essentially on French.

I lived a great deal with the Spanish milieu. I learned Spanish without ever… There I had the courage to tell myself, very well, I spoke Spanish very fast, and Catalan. Catalan, I understand it well, it is Niçois. One fine day, there were many lectures to give in Italy, I decided — I who no longer spoke Italian, though I had many Italians in consultation — to tell myself, I speak Italian, I am going to find my Italian again. It is interesting, it had been 40 years that I had not spoken it.

It came back right away. But immediately, I unblocked my English. It is interesting, I had trouble doing it. I spoke English with speed. I think that the moment you unblock yourself, you must have the courage. That they understand you and that you understand.

You jump into the bath, and after that it comes back right away. One must not have any inhibition. I believe that the good fortune of what we bring is that it removes these inhibitions. By contrast, education as it is done — just with, you have seen, from time to time, a child already has trouble finding his way with his letters. He has trouble managing with his phonetics. He is taught only phonetics.

It is indeed an alphabet that has no end. It looks like Sanskrit with the 72 lockings. He does not get out of it and he refuses. The courage is to tell a child to go for it. Somewhere, we are always children with respect to a language, you set yourself to it. Not Baragbini or Baragbini, but very quickly, with the courage to do it, you are going to integrate very fast.