The Benedictine monks who were wearing themselves out

This account is not a contemporary testimony but a historical case, reported by the Canadian psychiatrist Norman Doidge in The Brain’s Way of Healing (2015), where he uses it to illustrate Tomatis’s central idea: the ear “recharges” the brain. The monastery concerned is generally identified as the Benedictine abbey of En-Calcat (Dourgne, Tarn).

Inexplicably exhausted monks

In the mid-1960s, following the Second Vatican Council, a Benedictine community experienced an upheaval in its rule. A new father abbot, believing he was drawing the consequences of the conciliar reforms, abolished the Gregorian chant that until then had set the rhythm of the monks’ days — six to eight hours of chant daily.

The effects were not long in coming. With no apparent cause, the monks became tired, dejected, as if deprived of energy. Many could no longer keep up their schedule, slept more without feeling rested, and slid towards a depressive state. Several physicians were called to the community’s bedside. One attributed the exhaustion to diet — the Benedictines, having become partly vegetarian, were said to lack strength — and had a more substantial diet restored: without result. Others prescribed more sleep and rest: the monks’ condition only worsened.

Tomatis’s diagnosis: an ear deprived of its charge

Consulted in his turn, Alfred Tomatis proposed an explanation of an altogether different order. According to him, Gregorian chant was not a mere spiritual practice: by its richness in high-pitched sounds, it constituted for the monks a genuine source of nervous energy. By singing several hours a day, they “recharged” their brains; by ceasing to sing, they had cut themselves off, without knowing it, from this daily stimulation.

Tomatis saw in this an illustration of one of his guiding ideas: the ear does not have hearing as its sole function, it also serves to energize the cortex. High-frequency sounds, abundant in Gregorian chant, would act as a cortical recharge; their disappearance explained the collapse of the community.

The recovery

Tomatis had the chant restored and added to it an auditory stimulation according to his method. The recovery, Doidge reports, was spectacular: within a few months, the monks regained their vitality, their capacity for work and their low need for sleep, and were able to resume the demanding rhythm of monastic life.

Beyond the anecdote, this case occupies a place of choice in Doidge’s argument: he sees in it an intuitive demonstration, prior to contemporary neuroscience, of the role of sound stimulation on the state of the brain — one of Tomatis’s intuitions that neuroplasticity would later come to illuminate (see the “Scientific debates” section).