Sound

Aajonus treated sound, particularly vocal sound and music, as having measurable physiological effects. He stated that singing for twenty minutes is the equivalent of one hour on a treadmill in terms of physical exertion. His reasoning was that controlling pitch and sound through breathing and through the fluctuation of the mouth and throat engages muscles and nerves not normally used during other forms of exercise. He pointed to opera singers as examples, noting that one cannot produce that volume and energy while thin, and that a massive quantity of fat is required to regulate the breathing and sound production necessary for opera-level performance. He contrasted this with Mick Jagger, who he described as having a heavy, strong voice but being skinny because he does not eat enough to support the energy expenditure of that vocal output, burning everything up.

He described soundproofed rooms used in primal therapy settings as spaces where people could go to scream, kick, throw objects, sing, or use trampolines to release stored emotional energy. He framed singing as the most strenuous exercise available and the most effective method of using sound for physical release.

Aajonus made specific claims about the neurological effects of particular sounds. He stated that the word "Aum" scientifically changes brain waves, and that certain songs and tones can as well. He compared this to the Catholic practice of saying the rosary, which he stated he had examined using EKG data and found produced no change in alpha state in the brain. The Hail Mary and the Our Father were similarly described as ineffective in altering brain wave patterns.

In contrast, he identified the Catholic hymn "Ave Maria" as producing a measurable physiological effect. He stated that it smooths out irregular wave patterns and brings on alpha waves in the brain, making it a song worth singing from a physiological standpoint. He framed this not in religious terms but in purely neurological ones, noting that the song produces an alpha state while the rosary does not.

Aajonus's most extended discussion of sound concerns his own autism and the destruction of his brain's communication center by a tetanus shot administered at eighteen months old. The effect was total. He became unable to understand that sound had meaning, that sound could be formed into words, or that words could be constructed from symbols. The disability was not one of hearing but of processing. He could receive auditory input but could not decode it as communication. Sound existed for him purely as rhythm, tone, and pattern.

From ages three to five, he only parroted sounds. He could not relate the sound of the word "apple" to the object apple. He could not grasp that a letter represented part of a word, or that a word was part of a phrase. By age eight, he had accumulated enough sound bites through sheer repetition to begin mimicking phrases he heard frequently at home, such as "shut up," "sit down," "be quiet," and "pay attention." He would deploy these when a syllable in something directed at him resembled the beginning of one of those phrases, without any understanding of context. He described being in constant trouble with teachers because of this pattern.

When his autism reversed after consuming raw milk and raw carrot juice for approximately ten days in his late teens, the transition was described as sudden, a snapping off of the autistic state. Prepositions, adverbs, and other parts of speech that he had seen diagrammed on chalkboards all suddenly made sense, because they had been presented in diagrammed form and he had an exceptional visual memory for diagrams. He called his uncle and held a forty-minute coherent conversation, the first of his life, and the uncle initially believed it was an actor imitating Aajonus's voice.

He also described a residual effect of this period. Because he had understood language through tone, rhythm, and feeling rather than through semantic meaning, he had independently assigned definitions to words based on the emotional quality of their sound. When the autism ended, he described himself as "Mr. Malaprop," using words whose sounds felt correct to him but whose actual meanings were entirely wrong. He stated that he believed all language should work this way, that all language should be understood in all parts of the body as music is, and expressed frustration that no human language he knew actually functioned that way.

Aajonus's father broke both of his eardrums at some point during his childhood by striking him on both ears simultaneously. He lost eighty percent of hearing in one ear and sixty percent in the other. Over many years on the raw diet, this partially reversed. The hearing levels switched, so that the ear with eighty percent loss gained function and the ear with sixty percent loss became the more affected one, though he was still reversing the damage at the time of the described workshops. He treated this as an example of how the body, given the proper nutritional materials, can rebuild damaged sensory structures over long periods.