Asymmetrical tonic neck reflex

And then when I became an instructor in banking, where I was working, my boss used to say to parents, because it was a private tuition school and these kids were quite disruptive, he would say to the parents, look, if you want them to stay, they have to see Moira.

and i'd go ah okay you know it's one way to learn i have a lot of kids to learn with very quickly and and i had this one boy who one day came and i'd seen him a few times he was very smart but he was always in trouble and he said to me this time he said i've worked it out more when the teacher yells i get disturbed and i disturb others and i can't help myself And so I had a paragraph, someone had sent me about the Moro reflex and about the ATNR.

And so I read that paragraph, I think it's the Moro, and we just did what I had at the time.

But he had a very clear intention for himself.

Can you crawl across the room? No concept of how to do that at all.

And that's telling me information about where they are.

So, you know, so I know to crawl my ATNR has to be.

in place and my TLR has to be in place.

That's how you generate the movement.

And where is this applicable? In reflexes called ATNR, which is asymmetric tonic neck reflex.

STNR, symmetric tonic neck reflex.

TLR, tonic labyrinthine reflex.

Writing reactions, protective extensions, equilibrium reactions.

Right.

What's an ATNR? When the head turns to one side, the limbs on that side will tend toward...

Will move...

But one to two years, it should integrate, and you do this, and there should not be any movement.

You learned about Moro, deep breath, and you learned about ATNR, asymmetrical tonic neck reflex.

There are so many more reflexes, but ATNR, this is the archer pose, so this arm is bent.

This arm, baby is looking at their fist.

So I found a picture of my oldest laying on his baby play mat, and he's in the archer pose.

So they're looking at their fist, and then the nervous system signals them to turn their head, so they have to use the gyroscope for their head, the vestibular system, to orient their head around and switch their whole body and mirror the other side.

Well, because that's the beginning of visual processing, the brain, that is a reflex that's moving them back and forth, and it is developing the pathways from the ear to the rest of the brain, both visual and auditory, right? 'Cause obviously you're seeing, that's the visual that's going back to the occipital lobe, but the moving your head back and forth, that's the vestibular system, also the beginning of the auditory pathways that go from the ears over here to Wernicke and Broca's area and all that good stuff.

So when I have kids that come in with reading, math, and spelling problems, I have yet to find a student who is not having problems with ATNR.

If we still have a retained, so it's called an asymmetric tonic neck reflex.

Flex or like an ATNR.

It's the first like hand eye coordination with a baby.

When you hand them a toy, they look this way.

Those reflexes are more connected to isometric muscle tone.

What's isometric muscle tone? That's contract and hold, okay? So what do I mean by that? So the classic way to test the ATNR reflex, you put the kiddo on their hands and knees, you turn their head.

If the arm buckles, right, that's gonna be a positive ATNR reflex.

Why? Because they lack the muscle spindle integrity to hold an isometric muscle tone when they get that type of vestibular stimulus, okay? So it's not just, okay, well then turn the head, turn the head, turn the head, fire the reflex.

No, we have to convert our muscle spindles from that concentric state to be able to facilitate an isometric hold.