Paul Madaule — “The Dyslexified World” — Alfred Tomatis

Video testimony (in English). Paul Madaule, first a student and later a close collaborator of Alfred Tomatis, is the founder and director of The Listening Centre in Toronto (Canada). In this interview he discusses his article “The Dyslexified World”, an international conference held in Toronto in 1978, as well as his own listening-training programme. As the video is in English, the summary below renders its content in English here; the full transcript appears at the bottom of the page. The biographical elements are limited to what Paul Madaule says himself.

In this video, Paul Madaule recounts that, ten years after following his own listening-training programme, he was invited to speak at an international conference held in Toronto in 1978. His intention: to make people understand what dyslexia is from the inside, from the point of view of the person concerned, and no longer only from the point of view of the educator, the psychologist or the specialist.

Dyslexia “seen from the inside”: a “dyslexified world”

Paul Madaule recalls that, at the time, the word “dyslexia” covered a far broader field than it does today: it served as a blanket term for learning difficulties that we would now describe with other words (attention disorder, auditory-processing difficulties, and so on). He observes that everything written back then described dyslexia from the outside, and never from the lived experience of the person.

He says he himself rediscovered that experience later, after overcoming his own difficulties, completing his studies and beginning to work in another country and another language — South Africa, where he had to express himself in English. The feeling of being a foreigner there revived in him the “flavour” of his life as a dyslexic. Hence the phrase he repeats in the video:

“being a stranger in your own language” — being a stranger in your own language, in your own country, among your own people, and even more so with respect to yourself.

According to him, this lived experience feeds self-doubt: what we call a lack of confidence or low self-esteem would translate, for the person struggling at school, into a question of existence — “Who am I?”. He links this to certain behaviours common in the children concerned (playing the clown, or on the contrary withdrawing to the back of the class), which, he says, are interpreted as mere “behavioural problems”.

The central idea he puts forward: “when you receive the world distorted — when listening does not receive the information as it presents itself — then your world becomes distorted”. This is what he calls the “dyslexified world”. (On the vocabulary, note the distinction proper to the approach: to listen, an active process, is not to hear, a passive perception.)

A listening-training programme and a message to children

Paul Madaule says he draws on his own experience as a person who has known dyslexia — from which, in his view, one never fully escapes: “we just make them work for us and not disable us”. He readily presents these difficulties as a potential opportunity, provided they are understood and worked on: the people concerned, he says, have another way of perceiving the world.

In that respect, he reports that listening training, in his view, makes it possible to overcome at least part of it. The message he addresses to children and teenagers who feel “weird” or “inadequate”: there is nothing “broken” in the brain and nothing “mental” there, but a distorted perception, which in turn influences the way one acts and expresses oneself. He gives the example of processing information too slowly: by the time one has formulated an answer, the conversation has already moved on, and one feels like a fool.

Finally, he insists on the person behind the label: learning disability, attention deficit, autism-spectrum disorders (he mentions what used to be called “Asperger”)… These labels would have the advantage of letting one “belong to a family” and be understood, but the drawback of masking the child himself. For him, it is with that person that one must connect, conveying to them not only that one understands them, but that one perceives their potential.

From “The Dyslexified World” to “When Listening Comes Alive”

In closing, Paul Madaule notes that his book “When Listening Comes Alive” was written fifteen years after “The Dyslexified World” and is an extension of it: an elaboration on the same theme, aimed at explaining what it is to live with a listening problem affecting learning, language, communication and social behaviour.

Today: what the science says

Paul Madaule describes the inner experience of dyslexia with great subtlety, and the distinction he draws between receiving the world and processing it overlaps with a reality of auditory processing. But the idea that listening training would make it possible to “overcome” dyslexia, attention disorder or autism — all placed under a single “distorted perception” to be repaired — is not supported: the evidence of the method’s effectiveness on dyslexia and learning disorders remains weak (the positive results come mainly from uncontrolled studies, and their authors themselves call for randomised trials), and autism is not a perception “to be corrected” but a neurodevelopmental way of functioning. This testimony holds as the word of a historical figure of the method, not as a demonstration of its effectiveness.

Sources

Auditory integration training and other sound therapies for autism (Cochrane, Sinha et al.) — insufficient evidence of effectiveness.

Editor’s note: this document is reproduced as a heritage testimony, in its original language (English). The remarks are those of Paul Madaule and are rendered as reported speech. Their publication does not constitute an endorsement of the method or of the effects described, in keeping with the site’s editorial line, which neither defends nor promotes the method.

Full transcript (in English)

Automatic transcription of the subtitles, lightly punctuated for readability; it may contain inaccuracies. The video is authoritative.

Ten years after I had my program, my listening training program, in Limpa, hey, I was asked to present in an international conference. In fact, the conference took place in Toronto. It was in 1978, and I was interested in trying to make people understand what it is to have dyslexia from the inside, from the experience of the person who is dyslexic.

Now, at the time, the word “dyslexia” was used in a much wider range than we are using it now. Now, most people think of dyslexia as confusing B and D, E and this kind of thing. At the time, dyslexia was a kind of a blanket word which covered learning disability, which became later also ADD, ADHD, auditory processing difficulty — all these words at that time in France didn’t exist. All this was dyslexia. And nothing that I could find explained what is dyslexia from the point of view of the dyslexic. Everything which was written — and a lot was written on dyslexia — always was from the point of view of the educator, of the psychologist, of the specialist, but not from the person himself.

What I found — the idea of being dyslexic came back to me later on, after I was, you know, not only did I overcome the problem, went to university, started working, and having to go and work in another country, in another language. And the first few months of — that was South Africa — I had to speak English in a world which was Afrikaans-speaking, and the feeling there’s a kind of the inside taste of what I was feeling, being a foreigner, brought back the flavor of this life as a dyslexic, which made me define dyslexia as being a stranger in your own language.

Now, what I will say is that having a listening problem is to be a stranger in your own country, in your own language, with your own people — and more than with other people, but with yourself. You start doubting yourself. You start not knowing exactly who you are. Now we talk about lack of self-confidence, poor self-esteem, poor self-concept — all those terms. It’s really experienced by the one who has a difficulty at school as “Who am I?”, which means a problem which seems to be at the surface — learning, reading and spelling mistakes, all those difficulties — are really, little by little, particularly with the onset of puberty and adolescence, starting to become an existence problem: “Who am I? Do I connect well? Why don’t I connect well with the world around me, where people think I’m weird? Why do I think people see me as being weird?”

And by doing that, I start behaving, acting, which we see very, very often with kids who have learning disability, ADHD: they are trying to be the clown of the class, or they try to withdraw, sit at the back, do not communicate, depending if they are more on the introvert side or the extrovert side. And we take all this as a behavioral problem.

My point of view is that when you receive the world distorted, when your listening does not receive the information as it comes to you, your universe, your world is going to become distorted. That is what I meant by the dyslexified world. I have used my experience of someone who had dyslexia and, to a certain extent, continued to live with those aftertastes of dyslexia. We never get completely out of the difficulty we have; we just make them work for us and not disable us. That is what I try to explain to children and to the parents of those who experience this kind of problem. We can live — and, you know, your stories have shown it — there are a lot of people who have succeeded having this kind of difficulty. They have another way of looking at the world. They have another perspective of things. Perhaps it has to do with the difficulties they have, which — I always present the difficulties they have as an opportunity, as a potential opportunity, if they know how to understand it, and of course if they work and overcome it.

The good thing, the fantastic thing, is that we have something in the listening training which permits to overcome at least some of it, which means what I’m trying to tell the kids and the youngsters who feel odd, who feel weird, who feel inadequate, who feel foreigner in their own world, that it is not something wrong with the brain. It is not something mental, not something which doesn’t work in the mind. It’s just the perception is distorted, and the way they come out is influenced by the perception. The way they act, the way they speak, is influenced by how they receive. If I receive an information too slow, for example, because my processing is too long, it’s going to take me more time to think about the answer, and in a normal conversation, when I come with an answer, other people or other kids are already talking about something, and I feel like a fool. Okay? I tell them all this not to worry. So it’s something which can be improved. It’s something which can be improved to a point that it’s not going to be a problem anymore. That’s my message to kids.

Another problem with children who have a problem like a learning disability, attentional deficit disorder, autism, children in the spectrum — what we were calling Asperger, you know, socially difficult, not knowing how to fit. Some children sometimes have difficulty with body image; they don’t know how to dance well socially, they don’t know how to move with the groove, you know — they just don’t have that ability. And they have those labels, and up to the parents, everybody sees them as those labels, even themselves. How many times do I hear, “Oh yes, I do this because I’m learning disabled,” or “I do this because I have Asperger syndrome.” Which in a way is good, because at least I belong to a family, I am understood; in another way is not good, because nobody is looking at who I am, who is behind the child. Behind this is the one we have to connect with — behind all those difficulties that I was describing, which for me have a lot to do (not fully, but a lot) with the way they perceive the world, process the world, make sense out of what they receive, and turn it out into expression, verbal and nonverbal.

There is a child, there is a person. If you can connect with a person, if you can tell that person not only “I understand you” but “I like who you are,” because I see all the potential there — you know, those things that you have a hard time right now expressing to people, I see it, I lived with it, and good for you, and we are going to try to get you out of that, to show people what you are capable of doing.

“When Listening Comes Alive,” in fact, was written 15 years after “The Dyslexified World,” and it was kind of an elaboration on the theme of the dyslexified world, to explain to people what it is to live with a listening problem affecting learning, language, communication, social behavior, etc.