Sensory Integration
When your sensory integration is wrong, how can anything else be right?
Difficulties in sensory integration make your world a confusing place. If you perceive friendly touch as frightening, or environmental sounds as threatening, it makes it very hard to negotiate your environment. If your receptors aren’t sending out the correct information about where you are in space, it becomes impossible to move through it: learn to crawl, walk, skip, run, do a jumping jack… it’s endless.
Imagine the chaos in sensory integration if any one of these processing levels is not happening.
Some of the areas impacted can include:
- attention,
- balance,
- postural control,
- motor planning,
- hyper-sensitivity,
- inability to follow directions,
- behavior,
- social skills,
- language
- … everything
For sensory integration to occur smoothly, all sensory information must travel a certain circuit. Initially, it comes in through the end organs (ears, eyes, nose, skin, joint receptors, and others) to your spinal cord. From your spinal cord it goes to the lowest levels of your brain stem, for preliminary processing. Here it is “screened” so that just the right amount of stimuli is available for processing- not more not less. The other action that happens here is recognition of the stimuli so it can be sent to the right place for processing. You want sound to go to the sound cortex, not to smell.
The next step in sensory integration is more specialized processing, such as taking sounds and turning them into words. This information then goes to the highest level of the brain for association with memories and other types of learning to determine meaning and response. Example, if sounds are turned into the word FIRE, the appropriate response might be to turn and run.
With the help of a highly trained Tomatis professional, an individualized program can be developed to encourage the brain to do a better job with sensory integration. Through the various functions available, Tomatis practitioners create an individualized program to help train the brain to become more vigilant and coordinated. Although we are using sound and vibration, we are actually addressing the mechanisms of all sensory processing. The Bonus is that all sensory integration will benefit!
