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S3 Episode 6: Sound as a Superpower: Breaking Barriers to Learning and Healing with Charlotte Davies

• Lucia Silver / Charlotte Davies • Season 3 • Episode 6

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Welcome
Welcome back to My Mighty Quinn, the podcast where we explore groundbreaking solutions to help parents address the root causes of their children's struggles. I’m your host, Lucia Silva, and I’m thrilled to have you join us for another insightful episode.

Today, we’re diving into the fascinating world of sound processing and its profound importance within child development. This episode is packed with actionable insights and expert advice to help you better understand how foundational skills like sensory integration and motor processing can unlock your child’s full potential.

Episode Summary
I’m joined by Charlotte Davies, an educational consultant, researcher, and Tomatis consultant. Charlotte’s expertise spans sensory integration, trauma, and sound processing therapy, making her a leading voice in child development.

We explore how sound acts as a superpower, influencing motor skills and emotional regulation. Charlotte shares her journey, from working in refugee camps to becoming a specialist in auditory therapy.

Discover how sound therapy can unlock a child’s potential, improve family dynamics, and even support young offenders in finding a new path.

Key Takeaways

  • The Role of Sound: Sound is the first sense to develop and is critical for motor skills, sensory integration, and emotional regulation.
  • Sound vs. Hearing: Hearing is not the same as sound processing. Charlotte explains how the brain interprets sound and why it matters.
  • Practical Tips for Parents: Learn to identify sound processing issues and integrate sound therapy techniques at home.

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[00:00:00] Lucia Silver: Welcome back to My Mighty Quinn, the podcast where we explore groundbreaking solutions to help parents understand and address the root causes of their children's struggles. My name is Lucia Silva and I am the CEO and founder of the Brain Health Movement and the very proud mother of the Mighty Quinn.

[00:00:19] Lucia Silver: Our mission is simple and huge, all at once to empower and educate parents with the latest science tools, case studies, and leading integrated medical expertise needed to unlock your child's full potential.

[00:00:35] Lucia Silver: Through conversations with world class experts, we aim to demystify the complex factors impacting child development and provide actionable steps for healing and growth. Today we are thrilled to welcome the remarkable Charlotte Davis to the podcast, and today's episode is called Sound as a Superpower, breaking Barriers to Learning and Healing with Charlotte [00:01:00]Davies.

[00:01:01] Lucia Silver: Charlotte isn't just an educational consultant with over 12 years of experience. She's also been a deputy head teacher and continues to be a leading researcher in child development and a world-class tomatis consultant specializing in auditory and sound processing therapy. Her work has transformed the lives of countless children, helping them overcome barriers to learning and thrive both academically Charlotte Davies and emotionally.

[00:01:30] Lucia Silver: Charlotte's expertise spans motor skills. Sensory integration, sound processing, and trauma, all critical, yet often overlooked areas of development. Her passion for change has fueled her mission to help children in care, those with trauma histories and also young offenders. She's also a powerful advocate for systemic reform in education and teaching, offering tangible ways to measure and [00:02:00] improve outcomes for all children.

[00:02:02] Lucia Silver: And as we enter 2025, this conversation couldn't be more timely. It's a fresh start and a chance to reflect on how we can better support our children by addressing the foundational skills that underpin their learning confidence and wellbeing. So let's dive in and discover why Charlotte believes that sound is more than just hearing.

[00:02:26] Lucia Silver: It's a superpower that can transform lives. Hello and welcome to my mighty Quinn, Charlotte. 

[00:02:33] Charlotte Davies: Hello Lucia, and thank you very much for inviting me. It's very generous of you and listening and taking me so seriously. 

[00:02:40] Lucia Silver: Oh, it's our great privilege to have you, Charlotte. And I'd love to start with your background, if we may.

[00:02:45] Lucia Silver: It's so incredibly diverse and impactful. What got you to this point and specifically inspired you to focus on sound?

[00:02:54] Charlotte Davies: Oh, long, long line of things. So I started out as an auditor. The most important [00:03:00] thing I learned in auditing was to check for what's called full and no false inclusion. Is everything there that should be there and nothing there that shouldn't be there. And then I had a few months working in the Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong and that really highlighted to me how much environment impacted on child development.

[00:03:20] Charlotte Davies: When I returned to the UK and I wanted to train this teacher, I was shocked by the state of children in Britain compared to the. Chinese, Japanese and Korean children. I've been teaching in Hong Kong and I didn't really know what to do about them. And I hid out in grammar schools to be perfectly frank, thinking that, when I had children, they'd be super human beings and we'd have no problems.

[00:03:44] Charlotte Davies: And lo and behold, by six, my son came home and described a game and it was obvious from his comments that he was blind. He could not recognize his friends, and I knew we got there because he'd been eye patched for three years by our local hospital, [00:04:00] and I diligently followed their advice. What had done was cut off links from my brain and he told me in no uncertain terms, it was my job to fix it.

[00:04:09] Charlotte Davies: And so off I went to try and find a solution. I was very lucky. I found some South Africans who knew how to reopen pathways right brain, and knew how to get the motor skills going. We've been friends now for 20 years. Over those 20 years, we've expanded our understanding and one of the things that's become really obvious is that sound is the first sense.

[00:04:34] Charlotte Davies: Sound is the oil in the system, and that speeds up and accelerates integration of senses and motor skills. It makes things work better. If you don't use sound, you can't really get a good solution. So I'm really quite excited by sound 

[00:04:51] Lucia Silver: sounds, no pun intended, quite extraordinary, Charlotte, that you began actually with a child who was blind but found your way [00:05:00] back via.

[00:05:00] Lucia Silver: Sound, and I think this is really why I wanted to focus on this today, to understand that sound isn't simply hearing words. The inner canals and the vestibular are balanced systems as well as what then leads into our motor development, which then in turn leads into so much more.

[00:05:19] Lucia Silver: Much of that begins with the way that we process sound, and I gather that is why you call it such a superpower. So can you explain a little bit why it's a superpower and what you mean by that? 

[00:05:32] Charlotte Davies: So go back to conception. When our cells start splitting, we are already forming our sound processing system with our ears and our cochlear and so on.

[00:05:42] Charlotte Davies: But we're also support developing our tracker in our voice box. And as the set, as the cell split sound processing develops. So by 24 weeks will sound processing architecture is all in place. And you are [00:06:00] hearing sounds in the environment. You are hearing things through your mother's amniotic fluid. You are hearing her the rhythms of her body, her heartbeat, her digestion.

[00:06:09] Charlotte Davies: You are hearing the rhythm of her speech. You are already tuning to your language. You are getting the soundscape of the domestic environment. So that's quite important when we're thinking about children growing up in very hostile environments.

[00:06:24] Charlotte Davies: My heart bleeds for them. So we've got a long period when you are already inside mum and you are developing a sound processing. And sound processing is going to affect your balance. It's going to link to optic nerve, it's going to link to your facial muscles. It's all preparing you for birth. So as you come out of the birth canal, the one myelinated sense you've got is sound.

[00:06:53] Charlotte Davies: So when sound triggers and you hear a sound, you by reflex will turn your head [00:07:00] to that sound and that will trigger motor skills. If you don't get sound, you, it's much harder for you to trigger the motor skills. So if children don't go to a full-time birth, that can affect the development of their sound processing.

[00:07:17] Charlotte Davies: In other countries, they're putting sound therapy through premature babies. In order to accelerate their development and bring them to a better state. And as we go through life, our sound keeps triggering all sorts of things and linking to our other senses. If we feel under threat, we will close our sound down by reflex.

[00:07:45] Charlotte Davies: It's a way of protecting ourselves, particularly when we're small so we can close down our sound and then we're effectively separating out our senses. We can just keep our heads down and survive, which is great if you [00:08:00] are captured by an the next door tribe. It's less great living in a modern environment where all sorts of things traumatize people.

[00:08:09] Charlotte Davies: So sound instigates things. If things get delayed and we get the sound going, that often affects global development. So 

[00:08:18] Lucia Silver: it's a fundamental milestone. We often look at the pyramid of development. We look at the we try and educate parents a little bit on exactly what the steps are in how the brain develops and how motor processing and sensory development begins.

[00:08:33] Lucia Silver: But where in that is sound? You said sound is one of the first myelinated systems that we have. It's 

[00:08:40] Charlotte Davies: The first my By that 

[00:08:42] Lucia Silver: do you mean? It's the first that connects to the brain specifically. Yes. So if it connects to the brain specifically how is that all happening at the beginning, Charlotte?

[00:08:51] Lucia Silver: Is it for in, in vitro in the womb, we would be none the wiser to know how things were developing. We're not [00:09:00] able to know how sound processing is developing until the appearance of a little person. Or could we assume that if we've had a pregnancy where there's been trauma and noise and stress, that it is inevitably going to have an effect on auditory processing?

[00:09:15] Lucia Silver: How do we advance and prevent, take preventative measures around this area? 

[00:09:22] Charlotte Davies: It's worth doing things like sound therapy when you are pregnant, that relaxes you and that means you and the baby are both doing sound therapy together. Post-pregnancy, you can do things that lie the baby on your chest if you are doing sound therapy.

[00:09:37] Charlotte Davies: So is the baby. You will both process sound through your bone conduction. So that coming, bringing a baby to calm, the more secure the baby feels, the calmer the baby feels, the less they're going to carry any trauma. And by and large, my work with trafficked women is leading me to believe that women are very [00:10:00] good at keeping things calm for their babies.

[00:10:03] Charlotte Davies: And they protect their babies very well. The babies often survive it. If the mother is keeping everything secure 

[00:10:12] Lucia Silver: Yes, absolutely. I mean that I think we, we seem to have nervous systems built of steel sometimes as parents and biologically I think we're programmed to, to do that.

[00:10:22] Lucia Silver: But I am more and more aware as time has gone on, as I know you will be too. And the hundreds of parents that we speak to, that while we've been putting together educational platforms and bringing experts in for everything that we can offer to a child for their development and hopefully as early as possible for that child, I've become more and more aware of the importance of the nervous system of mum or primary carer.

[00:10:49] Lucia Silver: And we've started, even with our courses now involving modules before we even begin on working on the children, on working on mum or key carer and I've [00:11:00] spoken very transparently on our podcasts about my experience with Quinn that when he. Was first diagnosed with his pans and this autoimmune condition suddenly erupted, age eight, nine.

[00:11:11] Lucia Silver: I was definitely not feeling calm enough in myself to be able to help him heal, and I went actually towards a form of sound therapy. I felt that was something through listening that would help me calm down and it really did. So please, everyone listening as we're listening to this, I know we're talking predominantly about child development, but please bear this in mind for yourself as well, because we really like to take a whole child, whole family approach to healing.

[00:11:41] Lucia Silver: And I know that Charlotte's work often starts with the whole family unit and how's everybody doing, right? 

[00:11:49] Charlotte Davies: Yes. So people invite me in often because they're worried about the child and I arrive and I've usually asked them all to be present and then I say. Thank you to the [00:12:00]child for inviting me and can they help me assess the whole family?

[00:12:04] Charlotte Davies: And by the end, everybody understands that everybody, every modern human has problems with some aspect of sound, vision and motor skills. And the once we bring it to an integrated state, and if we all work together, we all stay in tune. So the whole family grows together. And often it's quite revolutionary for a family.

[00:12:23] Charlotte Davies: I've had families where mom and dad have changed jobs and careers completely. They're much happier, more fulfilled people. Children are much, feel much more secure. Everybody develops well long-term. Everyone fulfills their potential and feels much happier. And that's the ideal we want to work through. And that sense that there aren't any special people, we've all got bits missing and we all need to keep working on and maintaining what's called good motor sensory integration.

[00:12:52] Charlotte Davies: So our sound, our vision, our motor skills all work together and we don't have moments when we feel terribly anxious. [00:13:00]

[00:13:00] Lucia Silver: So taking that in mind then, let's just wind back again Charlotte, and have a look at how sound processing works. So first of all, lesson one, what is the difference between hearing and sound processing and why is that distinction in the first instance so important?

[00:13:18] Charlotte Davies: So you can hear something doesn't mean you can make any sense of it at all. So I have lots of clients who can sit in a classroom, they know the teacher is speaking, but they cannot make any sense of what the teacher's saying. What I for sound processing, it's that making sense of what's being said and there are various elements I have to check.

[00:13:41] Charlotte Davies: So for instance, can the child follow a speaker when the person is moving? So the physics between left and right sides of the ears are they working together? And a lot of my clients can't. Whatever side someone starts speaking to them on, they get stuck on. So if the [00:14:00] speaker moves, the person loses sense of that speech.

[00:14:03] Charlotte Davies: 'cause their ears can't do the complicated physics of sound waves coming from different physical positions. I look at whether somebody can cope with rhythm and maintain a rhythm. Rhythm is very important to humans, to synchronize all systems. And again, if they can't do that's a foundational skill that causes all these separate systems not to work together.

[00:14:28] Charlotte Davies: I look at whether someone can pitch, differentiate, so can they tell the difference between higher and lower sounds? And that seems like nothing, but if you can't do it often, you can't make sense of speech and context. So I say your mother, if you can't pitch differentiate, you might think I'm gonna say something really hostile about your mother.

[00:14:52] Charlotte Davies: If you can pitch, differentiate, you can tell from my tone that now I'm gonna tell your mom's really lovely. And what I [00:15:00] find with offenders, et cetera, is that lack of pitch differentiation means that they're often really in fight flight and quite a hostile state all the time, and they misinterpret messages and become aggressive very quickly when we get the pitch differentiation sorted.

[00:15:17] Charlotte Davies: They make much more sense of things. Everything calms down. I look at how well the person can process sound through air coming through their ears and living humans also process sound through bone, and we need air and bone conduction of sound to be working together, coherently both left and right sides.

[00:15:40] Charlotte Davies: So that's quite a lot of physics that the brain has to be doing very quickly. So the other business is that from zero to six, most humans are left ear dominant, which is fine. That's what they should be at about six, seven, they move over to right ear [00:16:00] dominant. That shift in ear dominance speeds up the speed at which they process sound.

[00:16:08] Charlotte Davies: My autistic clients will not make that switch. So there'll be a constant delay on their sound processing. So they're processing what you said two minutes ago, but we are now onto something else. So everything's scrambling. So it makes it very hard for them to process things in context. It makes very hard for them to sequence.

[00:16:29] Charlotte Davies: So there's all these different elements of sound processing. The ears have to be doing a fantastic amount of good physics and working really well together, send messages to the brain and left ear has to be sending, the right brain and right ear has to be sending to the left brain. And it all needs to be synchronized.

[00:16:50] Charlotte Davies: And as you can see, an awful lot can go wrong on the journey. So the most common thing is people get ear infections, colds, covid. That bungs [00:17:00] up the muscles in the inner ear, makes them lazy and they lose sound processing. We get the muscles working again. We stimulate the inner ear and lo and behold things start working.

[00:17:13] Lucia Silver: Absolutely incredible, isn't it? To think at how many levels it is impacting how we receive and experience the world. Just one area that you've touched on. You. If you are hearing the world as shouting and aggressive at you all the time, then it's no wonder you are gonna be in a state of fight or flight.

[00:17:32] Lucia Silver: It makes sense of when you have these little interactions, even when you're driving your car and you say something to somebody which actually wasn't meant to be aggressive at all, and then suddenly someone's absolutely screaming back at you. You think, goodness, all I meant was please leave now or please stop now, or whatever it might be.

[00:17:49] Lucia Silver: And it's been received in this height of aggression, which is probably because they were in a state of fight or flight already as well, but then aggravated by how they've received the information. [00:18:00] And then you've talked at another level, Charlotte, about how sound is actually processed through, through the ear and through the brain, and then how it's digested and how it's then understood. That's another level for children. And interesting too to hear that it actually works in the reverse of the brain. That in the first six years of life, the first three years is very much where the right brain is developing and understanding the world.

[00:18:25] Lucia Silver: And then moves to the left, which is the opposite as it needs to be with the ear. Because as I understand what you're saying, the left feeds the right side of the brain and the right ear feeds the left side of the brain. But you can imagine how quickly, if there are delays in any of those areas or Im maturities of any kind, then the whole system starts to wobble, doesn't it?

[00:18:44] Lucia Silver: And then you've spoken as well about vestibular and balance, which is also related to the inner ear. And if our children, which we know through a lot of the primitive reflex integration work that we talk about a lot, if children are struggling [00:19:00] with certain of the reflexes not being integrated and in tandem with this auditory processing, then life is out of sync life is off balance. 

And when you don't feel steady physically and you're not receiving the world in a balanced way and processing information in an orderly fashion, life feels unsafe. So you can start to understand these compounded areas, many of which stem from the ears, the hearing. Next place then.

[00:19:32] Lucia Silver: So what does a typical sound processing issue look like in a child? Are there any early signs that parents can look out for? 

[00:19:41] Charlotte Davies: So the obvious is going to be things like delays in speech or the child is always shouting at you and their voice is really loud and they don't seem to be able to moderate their voice because they, the voice represents a fair indication of what they're hearing.[00:20:00]

[00:20:00] Charlotte Davies: So if they can't make sounds and they are shouting loudly, that gives you a very good impression. If they can't sing in tune, it gives you a very good impression. If they can't keep a beat, it's giving you a good impression that there are problems with the sound processing. I know certainly of watching my nephew who's 18 months and he can drum and he can play piano, reasonably rhythmically and I'm now realizing actually from 18. months its pretty obvious

[00:20:27] Charlotte Davies: so really the very early play, you are looking to see what's their balance looking like? What's their rhythm, what's their sound processing as they develop through, and are they picking up and they responding to auditory clues or are they asking you to turn the television up and everything's at an incredible volume, in which case they're really not picking up maybe 40, 50, 60 decibels and their sound is quite suppressed.

[00:20:54] Lucia Silver: So some good headliners there to look out for. I certainly noticed with Quinn, when I [00:21:00] started doing the neurodevelopmental work at home, that primitive reflex integration about a year ago. Quinn's father's a dancer professionally and I am a great lover of dance. So I was really shocked when I noticed that Quinn in the early stages wasn't dancing in time to the music.

[00:21:17] Lucia Silver: I was horrified. I was like, what's going on? We're from a musical dancing family here. And what was extraordinary, Charlotte, is that once we had integrated some of the primitive reflexes started to just get on the right track with his development. I now watch him dancing. He's bang on beat.

[00:21:34] Lucia Silver: So that's a very interesting that is starting, to fall into place now. I know that we've got a little bit of work to do within auditory processing still but it is very encouraging to see that suddenly as it does slide into place and when parents go, oh, there's nothing I can do.

[00:21:51] Lucia Silver: There absolutely is. Things really do change. We've talked about what a typical sound processing issues look like in a child. How might [00:22:00] parents and teachers identify whether these sensory or motor skills are contributing to a child's struggles in school? How do we patch it together and see it working through there?

[00:22:13] Charlotte Davies: I was in a school yesterday, we were going through motor skills, sound vision, and I was explaining to them that we have to get sound processing working or we can't get vision working. We have to get motor skills working, or we can't get vision working. We can't get to reading and writing until we've got sound, vision and motor skills all working together properly.

[00:22:35] Charlotte Davies: So it's, it is a pyramid of development, primitive reflexes, the sound processing have to be in place for us to develop higher level skills. And we have got to do checks that these things are in place. If we don't get the primitive reflex and the sound in place, we cannot get the vision working properly.

[00:22:56] Charlotte Davies: It's as simple as that. So much better to go [00:23:00] back to basics, get them all in place and build up the child to the point where they are really confident and well-grounded. 

[00:23:08] Lucia Silver: So just translating back how that would look in a classroom I've used examples previously, but I'd love to hear your sort of take on it.

[00:23:15] Lucia Silver: When you have a combination of, we're talking in umbrella terms, motor sensory, so that's where movement relates to the sensory. Sensory is how you hear and how you see. And it's also your proprioception and your balance. So all of those systems are tied in together. So in a classroom, for example.

[00:23:36] Lucia Silver: I'll give one example, but I know you're gonna have a gazillion more Charlotte. But I think this, it's astounding that if a child has, for example, Morrow reflex still being retained in the classroom and the teacher comes in and puts the overhead lights on and slams the classroom door for a child who hasn't yet integrated the reflexes and their auditory processing isn't where it perhaps needs to be, [00:24:00] that is gonna be like a lion coming in and roaring in the middle of the jungle and then saying to them.

[00:24:05] Lucia Silver: Could you ignore that, please and just get on with your studies. A child's nervous system has literally gone into high alert, what we call a fight and flight state, where the sympathetic nervous system hormones and adrenaline, everything's running high, heartbeats going panicked breathing in some cases might instigate a panic attack in the worst cases.

[00:24:27] Lucia Silver: So you know, that is the sort of effect it's having on an immature nervous system in the classroom. But Charlotte you are in classrooms all the time assessing and helping teachers understand how else might it look? Because I am a great advocate. We are in our entirety at the brain health movement.

[00:24:46] Lucia Silver: There's no such thing as a bad child. This is not bad behavior on the part of children. This is. A need expressing itself or a developmental challenge presenting. So would you go through just a few of [00:25:00] things we're seeing in classrooms and parents are gonna go, my kid does that, or the teachers complain about that.

[00:25:05] Lucia Silver: But actually it's this. 

[00:25:09] Charlotte Davies: Okay. With a school chain, back in the summer, I screened 311, 12 year olds. None of them had excellent development, none. So in a classroom, what I am seeing is leaning. As soon as I see them lean, I know they're working with one eye. I know the posture is outta kilter, so their motor skills aren't good.

[00:25:30] Charlotte Davies: But also they're compromising the sound processing. I see a lot of wriggling and distraction. I know that they just can't hold a focus. So one of the things we did on this screening was we checked eye tracking. None of them could track really skillfully with two eyes. And that really ought to be in place by eight, nine years old.

[00:25:49] Charlotte Davies: And these were 11, 12 year olds. It wasn't there. And some of them were really quite frighteningly bad. And you can do quite simple things. Look at the handwriting. Can [00:26:00] they write really nice cursive handwriting? And I can assure you, you go into modern astro, very few children can. We did a test called the Tansley Figure Ground Test.

[00:26:11] Charlotte Davies: What we asked children to do with draw simple shapes. So square triangle circle, we asked 'em to draw thrombus and to draw uni jacks. We show them the card for a count of five. We turn the card over, they draw the shape. The vast majority could not draw symmetrical shapes, and that reflects the imbalance in their whole body.

[00:26:39] Charlotte Davies: Which ends up resulting in their vision being unbalanced so they can't draw a symmetrical shape. Some of the diamonds were coming out much more like stars. They didn't even see it as a diamond 'cause their vision was flickering so much. Things like the Union Jack, they couldn't recall where the lines were.

[00:26:58] Charlotte Davies: This our national flag, these [00:27:00] 11, 12 year olds, they could not recall. They would just draw random lines everywhere. One of the other simple things we asked them to do was draw a line across the page. Now, if I draw past, most people in my generation should do that. They'll draw a line from left to right, huge number.

[00:27:18] Charlotte Davies: The children drew from top to bottom because they do not cross their midline because they've got such poor development. One of the problems is if I say to you you can spot this in a classroom. You'll go, oh no, my child's okay. But I'm actually saying, no. Modern environments, we've got an epidemic on our hands.

[00:27:39] Charlotte Davies: It's not one child. It's pretty much everybody has got gaps. When I sorted out my son by 12, he was doing really well. And remember he was blind at six. We'd sorted everything out. We got his confidence sorted. We turned round and realized everybody else had got gaps. [00:28:00]And the problem is that if we don't address those gaps on a timely basis, then everyone's a bit reluctant to deal with them.

[00:28:08] Charlotte Davies: So in this classroom, in a modern environment, I'd say we ought to be looking at everybody checking every single person, what are their motor skills looking like? Do they make involuntary movements, so things are angels in the snow. You get them having to move opposite arm and leg with their eyes closed, and you get a lot of involuntary leg movements asking people to skip forwards and backwards, and they can't move with opposite arm and leg.

[00:28:38] Charlotte Davies: It's just asking people about their reading and would they read aloud? And often they say, no, I don't like to read aloud, which is not surprising because it's so hard for them to integrate sound and vision. 

[00:28:52] Lucia Silver: And copying from the blackboard. Charlotte is another one, isn't it?

[00:28:55] Lucia Silver: When you're looking up and then looking back down again? Yeah that's related to some of the reflexes just to [00:29:00] name them because our parents hopefully, who are following us are getting more and more familiar. But you've got the at and r, the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex.

[00:29:07] Lucia Silver: You've got the symmetrical tonic neck reflex particularly, and then TLR is when you start the labyrinthine, the Landau, when you start to work into postural reflexes. I still see Quim slumping a lot. We've still got to work on his core and his posture. And again, it's just to do these, stage by stage, and work your way through in the correct order.

[00:29:29] Lucia Silver: That would've happened. And much of this has stemmed, Charlotte, again, as we keep saying from lack of movement, that children have been on their screens, they haven't moved as much. And so normally a lot of these. Primitive reflexes and processing motor sensory would have evolved naturally. But because we're not moving as much, these reflexes are not being shut down.

[00:29:50] Lucia Silver: And so children are not developing the higher levels of attention and organization and planning and so forth, [00:30:00] and before that posture. So as Charlotte's saying, when, when you look into a classroom, we're seeing children wrapped around chair legs. And there was another fantastic pediatric expert I spoke to in America who'd.

[00:30:12] Lucia Silver: Was referring to a study of 6,000 children where something like 70% and the teachers were talking what were falling off chairs and clumsy. That's how bad it had got at a macro level. So yes. But anyway we're supposed to be focusing on sound specifically. It's very hard not to, isn't it, when everything interrelates so much it's comorbid and one impacts on another, and you've gotta unpack it and work out where your key areas for development are.

[00:30:40] Lucia Silver: So let's come back again. Yes, we've talked a little bit about what you thinks behind this epidemic. I've touched on the matter of movement. What else is impacting on why we're seeing sound processing challenges in children in terms of this becoming an absolute epidemic? What's missing or what are we doing too much of and so forth.

[00:30:58] Charlotte Davies: As in we [00:31:00] are ensuring that babies survive at birth. My mother was a midwife. If a baby did not look like it was viable, it'd be put aside for an hour to see if it would die. That was what was happening in the fifties and sixties. We've got vastly more technology now. We keep more babies alive, but we don't have a plan for what we're going to do with all these premature babies to support their development when we send them home.

[00:31:25] Charlotte Davies: And we really do need a plan with sound at the center of it. We have modern diets. You just think how much diets have changed. Companies have been re-engineering ultra processed foods, taking out traditional sugars, putting in corn syrup and things line by line. Basically, what you're seeing is food changed from what my grandmother would've seen as food to ultra processed where.

[00:31:55] Charlotte Davies: It's chemicals, and I was watching a video the other day of an Oreo biscuit. [00:32:00] Somebody's trying to set fire to it with a really quite powerful gas jet, and they couldn't burn it down. That's telling you the body cannot digest that food. I can go onto some estates. I can go into the local supermarket. I cannot find anything in that store that I would recognize as good food.

[00:32:22] Charlotte Davies: So we've really got to go back to the diets of our grandmother's, great-grandmothers and cook from scratch. Other things like breastfeeding and keeping things outta the mouth, but really encouraging nasal breathing to get the face formation developing better. Because with the ultra processed foods and the bottle feeding, humans faces are getting flatter.

[00:32:48] Charlotte Davies: You can get the faces to come out more. By doing simple things like nasal breathing, and that means when the child's had an infection or they're snotty and grotty, [00:33:00]you've got to get them back to breathing through their nose. And I have a video online showing you how to do that. But also, the other thing that's quite useful is if you get them to play games, putting their tongue on the roof of their mouth and just pressing upwards, and our face bones are actually quite loose.

[00:33:19] Charlotte Davies: They will move out if we keep pushing. We want children to be upright in that lower jaw to form properly. And again, that isn't happening as well as it could be doing. And getting out, making sure we've got upright posture because when you are upright, your eustachian tube drains all the airways in your head are draining properly.

[00:33:42] Charlotte Davies: And lo and behold, when your airways are clear, the muscles work properly. It's much easier for me to get sound therapy working effectively, whereas if everything's full of fluid, it makes very little impact. 

[00:33:56] Lucia Silver: Do you have a view on how ear infections should be treated? I know with our work [00:34:00] with Dr. Milow, it's quite linked into when there have been left brain delays, a lot of dyslexic children have had ear infections.

[00:34:08] Lucia Silver: There's a correlation and lots of research linking that. But if ear infections are occurring, is that indicative of a developmental challenge that you can look into straight away or, and are there ways that you would recommend treating those ear infections that were perhaps not doing that might aggravate the situation?

[00:34:27] Charlotte Davies: Diet. Diet and diet so that southie islanders of the study of them don't get inner ear infection. They've got much better, broader developed faces. They come out much more the more we eat ultra processed foods. Even things like bread. Rice and so on. We've been eating a lot of processed foods in the last 300 years.

[00:34:51] Charlotte Davies: It's flattening our faces. The last 20 years, the situation has massively accelerated and you have to get the [00:35:00] bone structure working in order to get the airways wider so that people can clear the airways. But if that hasn't happened, getting children to learn how to clear their airways and expand them is really important.

[00:35:16] Charlotte Davies: 'cause once you start nasally breathing, your sinuses change shape and your airways do get wider. They function differently, your body gets much better oxygenated, and then you can do all the remedial work. But at the moment, studies are showing that inner ear infection is affecting up to 80%. And it's, 

[00:35:37] Lucia Silver: that is huge.

[00:35:38] Lucia Silver: And is that myofacial therapy as well? We've been we've had quite a few experts circulating in that area in terms of clearing canals and making sure babies are breathing through their nose, not their mouth and so forth. Is that all connected? 

[00:35:51] Charlotte Davies: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Connected. 

[00:35:55] Lucia Silver: And so in the hierarchy of child development, this is really [00:36:00] key.

[00:36:00] Lucia Silver: So just to recap, Charlotte, where does sound processing fit into the hierarchy? What comes before it and what comes after it? As best we can say, just to recap before we move on and look at how it impacts on global development more, 

[00:36:14] Charlotte Davies: nothing much comes before it. So if I've got a profoundly autistic child, I will start with sound.

[00:36:21] Charlotte Davies: Get the sound going, then I can start communicating with the child, getting them doing primitive reflex exercises, get the primitive reflexes and the sound going. I can start getting the eyes moving separately to the head. Vision is your last sense to develop. And if we haven't got a good platform of sound and motor skills, we're not gonna get visual work.

[00:36:43] Lucia Silver: That's clear as crystal. Thank you. In terms of also child's global development, so you've said we start with our primitive reflexes. We start with autonomic nervous, then we move to our primitive reflexes, then we move to motor sensory. Then it's vestibular [00:37:00] and visual skills, and then we move on to.

[00:37:04] Lucia Silver: Concentration and the higher levels of motor planning organization, which is the prefrontal cortex, developing emotional regulation, being able to, to yes, plan and organize and remember really. So I always try and remind parents, they go, oh, they're not listening well, or they forget things or they can't organize their bag, that really is the very last stage and the metaphor that I use all the time is you can't expect the lights to go on when the wiring isn't in it is as simple as that.

[00:37:36] Lucia Silver: You've got to go back, as Charlotte says, and go through the foundational levels again. So from your work with young offenders and children in care, this is a very important part and quite dramatic, and I'd love it if you will to maybe share some individual case stories of. How you've seen sensory [00:38:00] integration and sound therapy actually create a change?

[00:38:02] Lucia Silver: Our real before and afters with the most affected youngsters.

[00:38:09] Charlotte Davies: So I was dealing with one youngster who was in a home for boys who were sex offenders in their mid-teens. They've been in care, they'd probably been sexually abused themselves before they could consciously recall. And then nobody had actually addressed any of their underlying problems or done any proper therapy.

[00:38:31] Charlotte Davies: They'd probably gone from care home to Care home and by mid-teens they were dangerous and they'd been got shipped off. And one of these boys, the parents, the foster carers had got me into assess him before he'd been sent to this unit. And so we worked with him and the sound processing. Moved quite dramatically from him not being able to access music at all to [00:39:00]everyone complaining about him singing in the shower constantly, and he ended up playing the guitar.

[00:39:06] Charlotte Davies: Other things we did were he couldn't move his facial muscles. We spent a lot of time working on getting his facial muscles, because if you can't move your facial muscles, it affects your social engagement. So think about sound, it's about social engagement. It's linking to the optic nerve, it's linking to the facial muscles, it's linking to interpreting someone's speech and the noises they're making.

[00:39:31] Charlotte Davies: So when you engage with a person socially, you can understand that person and their feelings. So if you've got a sex offender. Even if they're only 14, 15, you actually want their facial muscles working properly. You want them to be able to engage with the people in front of them. So getting his sound working properly, getting his motor skills working properly, getting his eyes working properly meant his social engagement, which is a very [00:40:00] much higher level.

[00:40:02] Charlotte Davies: And I don't think he worked out to be a perfect human being, but he did leave the unit with skills that were marketable, went on to have a relationship with an adult, and that is a wow. It's a lot cheaper 

[00:40:17] Lucia Silver: that, that is extraordinary. And what were you doing? What were you, just give us some examples of the sorts of interventions and therapies you were using with this.

[00:40:25] Lucia Silver: How old was he when you started working with him? He was 17, did you say? 

[00:40:29] Charlotte Davies: So he was about, oh, 14. No, he was about 14 when we started. Because when you get this, when they're abused early on and they have no recall. Yet they go through all this mess and at 14 15 that they can't socially engage. And you've got massive testosterone.

[00:40:46] Charlotte Davies: You have a dangerous situation. 

[00:40:47] Charlotte Davies: Yeah. And 

[00:40:47] Lucia Silver: the system is shut down, Charlotte. Really? It's in a permanent state of sympathetic fight flight, dorsal vagal state, and it's not really engaging at all. In some cases it's dorsal vagal shuts down into an [00:41:00] immobilized state completely and doesn't correspond anymore at all, as you say, with the world.

[00:41:04] Lucia Silver: I wonder at what stage that right brain development slowed down the social engagement and when there was no ability to 

[00:41:13] Charlotte Davies: I don't think he ever. Quite had it. So we were working from the scratch. The scratch, yeah. Because yes, and if I was running the care system in Britain, I would be screening these children pretty systematically all the way through making sure that everything was coming into place on a timely basis before.

[00:41:32] Lucia Silver: Absolutely. 

[00:41:33] Charlotte Davies: Because then it's so hard for youngsters 'cause their brain pretty much goes into meltdown and then everything goes wrong 

[00:41:39] Lucia Silver: and they've become understandably very oppositional because that is how they have survived. And you are then trying to say, how about these exercises?

[00:41:46] Lucia Silver: How about putting these headphones on? How about, and they're like, girl, they're, it's very much harder. 

[00:41:52] Charlotte Davies: Yes. We naturally block out our carers from about 12 years old, which is a good thing because your children must move [00:42:00] away from you and turn into adults. Naturally we would move out of the mother's home and be with the other adolescents in the tribe.

[00:42:09] Charlotte Davies: But that separation is important, but that has consequences if we have to go on doing therapies with children into their adolescent years of, 

[00:42:19] Lucia Silver: So Charlotte, you work and are very much a leading world expert on one particular auditory processing intervention, which is called the Tomatis method.

[00:42:28] Lucia Silver: I'm a very big fan of it as I'm reading and learning more and starting to play with it a little bit now with Quinn and I at home just to see. These areas that we can refine both of us. I hasten to add, not just Quinn. Me too. And Charlotte, you've been guiding us through a little bit with it, but I would love having never shared with our listeners really any in-depth work as far as interventions are concerned.

[00:42:51] Lucia Silver: Could you tell us a little bit more about this specific method and what makes it unique and effective? 

[00:42:58] Charlotte Davies: So it was founded by [00:43:00] a Dr. Alfred Tamati, who was a French ear, nose, and throat specialist. His father was an opera singer, so he got to work with a lot of opera singers and he was also working post-war with industrial workers who had serious sound loss.

[00:43:15] Charlotte Davies: And Tomatis realized that humans process sound through both air and bone. And up to that point, people had really only understood human sound processing by chopping up dead bodies. And there is a significant difference between our perception of how a living human processes sound and a dead one, and that shift is very important.

[00:43:42] Charlotte Davies: So Tomatis realized that by manipulating air and bone conduction of sound, that he could change how the inner ear works, and he could restore people's sound processing skills. He also realized the importance of [00:44:00] right ear dominance for a lot of people, though 70% of left ear people also ear dominant, 30% of left ear people are naturally left ear dominant.

[00:44:11] Charlotte Davies: So you want balance between the two ears. And just the basic physics of how a living human processes sound. He designed a system whereby it was possible for us to assess a human sound processing through air, through bone, how well they could follow sound, how well they could pitch, differentiate, and to step back and have a think about how did that look as a whole and to work out a program to move people's sound processing.

[00:44:44] Charlotte Davies: I like working with Tomatis because my experience to date has been it's highly effective and my clients don't want anything else. I also like it because I can screen like I screened you. I can screen you, I can give you a [00:45:00] measure of where I, where we are at with the sound processing. You can do the sound therapy.

[00:45:06] Charlotte Davies: I can come back rescreen you. We can then plan the next step and everybody's different. So I want to be checking all the way through how we are getting on and work through systematically moving people's sound processing to an ideal state. And I'm not aware of any other sound therapy that does that, where you're getting proper feedback, proper planning 

[00:45:31] Charlotte Davies: your train to manipulate programs to really optimize people's sound processing. So for instance, I can move people from left to right ear dominant, but I want to get the sound curves up and working well on both left and right to begin with. Sometimes, particularly with children, they just literally move over to right ear dominant.

[00:45:53] Charlotte Davies: I don't need to do any manipulation. When I'm working with adult autistics, for instance, in their fifties, then [00:46:00] I really do have to start manipulating them. And it might take me much longer, but I want to go carefully. Because I don't want to shunt you over to extremely right ear dominant such that you speak out to the right side of your mouth.

[00:46:15] Charlotte Davies: I want balance between left and right sound, so it's quite complicated. You are playing around with how someone's brain processes sound. 

[00:46:23] Lucia Silver: I have these images of you, Charlotte, producing these varied Frankenstein around the place, left your own devices but you're not a badie, you are a goodie.

[00:46:31] Lucia Silver: So we're safe in your hands. What I also think is really important is that there are a maelstrom of overwhelming interventions and protocols suggested to parents. And it feels overwhelming without them, let alone when you start researching what is available to help your child. And what I do personally, particularly like about the Tomatis method and the way that you work, is that it is diagnostic and measurable.

[00:46:56] Lucia Silver: So as you go as you're linking it also [00:47:00] into visual therapy, you might see a child drawing a line a certain way at the beginning of the work that you're doing. And then at the end you start to see how that line drawing has improved or the rendition of a triangle has improved. So you are day by day, not day by day, but you are tracking progress as opposed to just abstractly hoping for improvement.

[00:47:21] Lucia Silver: You are seeing improvement and I think that is a very important reflection of whether a therapy is water tight or not. Can you really measure as you go? So can you share some examples Again, Charlotte, I think it's so much easier for our parents and listeners to visualize a child like your young offender or 14-year-old young offender going from A to B.

[00:47:44] Lucia Silver: What sort of examples of the sound and motor sensory therapy have helped reverse some of the struggles or created dramatic improvements for you and your families? 

[00:47:54] Charlotte Davies: So I went to see one 8-year-old and he couldn't speak very [00:48:00]clearly and he was bouncing on his trampoline and quite distracted.

[00:48:04] Charlotte Davies: Took both his parents a lot of effort to get him to come in, and it was quite a struggle to assess where we were at with him. But when I had to look at his sound, we got absolutely chaotic sound on left and right on both air and bone conduction. He was missing about 70 decibells across the sound range, which explained why his speech was so bad in school.

[00:48:25] Charlotte Davies: He could hardly engage and the parents were getting quite desperate and the school were thinking of moving him to a special needs unit and it was all quite sad and I gave them some sound therapy to start off with. I told them to do primitive reflexes once we'd done the sound and some basic eye exercises as I do and went away, came back to pick up the equipment.

[00:48:52] Charlotte Davies: And who should answer the door. But our 8-year-old who spoke to me perfectly fluently and [00:49:00] was completely engaged and literally had in a matter of two weeks, moved years because suddenly his sound had come up and all he needed to really move things big time was one round of sound therapy and it was quite dramatic the change.

[00:49:19] Charlotte Davies: And the parents were blown away. He needed to go on and do more work to fine tune things, but really that big blockage had moved something in that sound therapy had just up his sound curves had gone from being very chaotic to somewhere near the ideal. That's incredible days. That's probably the.

[00:49:41] Charlotte Davies: More common is, somebody comes to me with a child who's barely speaking and it might take me six, eight rounds of sound therapy to get things working. And we've also got to get them the upright posture so we don't keep causing problems and blocking the sound processing. But generally I expect it [00:50:00] to make shifts.

[00:50:01] Charlotte Davies: And I work with people of all ages, so I've been working with a guy in his twenties who's got down syndrome. Parents are really pleased because his speech and language is widened dramatically. He's got better motor skills control, he wants to go to work and get a job. So we're working on building up those skills.

[00:50:21] Charlotte Davies: Been working with some adult autistics and they're very useful for me because even if I work with them for free, they tell me the changes that they're experiencing. So some of them say things to me like they now know which direction the buses are going in. Previously everything was flickering and so chaotic.

[00:50:40] Charlotte Davies: They didn't know. And it's predominantly just on sound therapy and things have calmed down. They can now sequence life is much more fun. And they also can work out and enjoy all sorts of plays and speech and language that previously they didn't enjoy. So [00:51:00]now it is just a matter of getting the motor skills and the vision all finely tuned.

[00:51:04] Charlotte Davies: But that's quite exciting. It's incredible. One of the Yeah. Yeah. So you, it's a matter of just persistently working your way through step by step. And we get there as long as everybody's diligent. But if you expect me to come in, do a miracle and your child lies on their sofa with a laptop for.

[00:51:24] Charlotte Davies: All the intervening time, we're not gonna get big changes. 

[00:51:27] Lucia Silver: No. And we're singing off the same hymn sheet on this one. And as this is why we're creating, the at-home courses that we are to with the best will in the world. And we are bringing the likes of yourself and so many other world leading experts to educate.

[00:51:43] Lucia Silver: But ultimately the work has to be done at home. Ultimately, it's up to you as parents. I took Quinn over the other side of the world to see Dr. Joshua Madson to start doing some neurodevelopmental work, which was fabulous, but I was very aware I was gonna get an intensive, concentrated version of what we [00:52:00] needed.

[00:52:00] Lucia Silver: And we all wanna be held and safe with a practitioner so that we know that we're doing the right thing with our child. Whether that's from a dietary point of view, from auditory processing, from primitive reflex integration, whatever it is you're working on, I understand absolutely that you want.

[00:52:15] Lucia Silver: To be held and to be taken care of by a practitioner. But ultimately the nature of neuroplasticity, which is our opportunity for change in growth, is consistent application. And that can only happen at home with you as parents. Think that's very important that we keep impressing that there is no magic pill, but when you listen to the work that Charlotte's doing, she is seeing extraordinary change.

[00:52:38] Lucia Silver: And it's not just coming from what she is able to put in place when she sees the children or the adults in question. It's what they're continuing to do when they go home.

[00:52:47] Charlotte Davies: I was gonna say, one of the really important aspects to my work is constantly telling parents and teachers, I am here to empower you. It's the best thing I can do for your mental health is give you complete control over your [00:53:00] body and brain. And that is the highest level of sanity. And then you control things and it empowers the whole community.

[00:53:09] Lucia Silver: Yeah. Become an 

[00:53:09] Lucia Silver: agent of your own change And your child's of course, as well. Yeah. So looking more globally, if you could change one thing in how schools approach learning and development, what would it be? 

[00:53:24] Charlotte Davies: I would change the curriculum from four to eight so that the absolute focus of the curriculum from four years to eight years will be child development.

[00:53:33] Charlotte Davies: It would look like we are playing, it would look like we're doing lots of music and movement and drama and painting, but actually we are doing child development, and child development. I would then have a formal assessment at seven, eight to check that everything was in place and some children are going to be a bit behind.

[00:53:50] Charlotte Davies: That's fine. Give them some extra focus support. Then we start formal education and trust me, it will go incredibly quickly [00:54:00] and everybody will be working at a very much higher level. 

[00:54:04] Lucia Silver: I'm with you on that. I'm behind you in the queue. I'm signing the petition. I'm right there. I, we've got a long way to go yet, but thanks to the work that you are championing and there are others in the field who know that readiness is all as regards learning.

[00:54:17] Lucia Silver: We're starting our children far too early in many cases, or we've overlooked milestones that they've missed and we need to help them get to where they need to get to. And as we've said, the good news is the younger we identify it, the earlier and the easier it is to mature those systems and support children to not just, we're not trying to make the world great academics.

[00:54:39] Lucia Silver: We just need children settled and happy and receptive to learning so that they can then be in a calm, fun state to enjoy school. And what's happening is we're getting this enormous fallout. These children that are missing those milestones come. Age nine 10. We start to see huge problems in school at [00:55:00] teenage years.

[00:55:00] Lucia Silver: They're not there. That, that, we've got school refusals hence me writing a mini book on the subject. We really are so much better to try and identify this as early as we possibly can and we will be delving deeper into this in our upcoming course, featuring you, Charlotte and launching soon.

[00:55:17] Lucia Silver: But for families starting this journey as a final point, what advice would you give for integrating sound therapy or sensory integration techniques at home to help their children? Just some key takeaways, please, Charlotte. 

[00:55:32] Charlotte Davies: I'd make Sound central. I would encourage people to buy an infinite Tomatis headset or link with a Tomatis consultant. 

[00:55:43] Charlotte Davies: And actually be assessed, see it as a sort of really important thing to do. If you can't afford to do that, then there's a thing called a forebrain, which also is quite useful if you can speak. So you use sound therapy little and often [00:56:00] and it just oils the whole system. So even if you think you've got everything really well wired and I used to think I did, honestly sound therapy has had half improved my driving, it's affected my vision, it makes me more alert.

[00:56:15] Charlotte Davies: So I use sound therapy most days. It really helps my body stay very fit, very upright. It really keeps my reaction time very good. So sound is just central, all sorts of resources. You can use different prices, but I'm afraid some. That you actually have to pay for Most of the other stuff I recommend. I can get you sort out for free, but sound is really worth integrating into your lifestyle.

[00:56:45] Lucia Silver: All ages. It 

[00:56:46] Lucia Silver: massive bang for your buck on that one. I think it's worthwhile expenditure. Charlotte, this has been shocking and incredibly insightful. The importance is [00:57:00] astounding of this area. So thank you so much for sharing your incredible insights with us today.

[00:57:07] Charlotte Davies: Thank you for having me. 

[00:57:09] Lucia Silver: It's clear that foundational skills, like sensory integration, motor skills, sound processing that you've discussed play a critical role in every child's development, not just academically, but in every area of their lives. Your passion and expertise, Charlotte, are really inspiring.

[00:57:25] Lucia Silver: Thank you. And I know our listeners have gained so much from this conversation. For those who want to dive deeper into Charlotte's work, you can find her details in the show notes. Don't forget to download the free checklist we've created to help you identify these areas where your child might be struggling.

[00:57:42] Lucia Silver: It's a great first step towards understanding and addressing the root causes of those challenges. Charlotte will also be one of the featured experts in our upcoming course, our Whole Child Multidisciplinary Approach and Roadmap to Healing, where we'll explore topics like sound and [00:58:00] visual. Processing in much greater depth.

[00:58:02] Lucia Silver: Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss updates about this exciting program and future episodes. And finally, if you found today's episode helpful, please share it with other parents who might benefit. Leave us a review and subscribe to my mighty Quinn on your favorite platform. Together we can continue to bring these life-changing conversations to more families.

[00:58:24] Lucia Silver: Until next time, remember, information is the mothership. Small steps lead to big changes, and healing is always possible. Big kiss and hugs into your day. Bye-bye for now.