Sensory integration
Are you looking for some answers? Have you failed to realise your gifts and talents? Do you want to understand more about your son’s learning challenges or your daughter’s behaviour? What’s really behind the label your grandson has been given? Would you like to be able to support them better? Are you stressed, struggling with emotional issues? Do you have problems with the way you see, hear, move, communicate or experience the world? Take a detailed look at sensory integration.
What is sensory integration?
We often think of our senses as the individual receptors for sound, sight, smell, taste and touch. In fact, our senses play a much more complex role in terms of how we develop and make the most of our individual genetic profile. They control all of the day to day tasks we have to carry out, as well as learning, behaviour, performance and emotional and physical well-being.
Our senses are designed to work in combination – like hand-eye coordination – allowing us to progress from simple to complicated tasks. This is known as sensory integration and also includes our senses of balance and movement. It describes the way in which our brains receive, process and analyse complex data from our senses and then use it – either to carry out a task or to store things in our memory for later.
For example: our sight allows us to see a ball. The sense of touch allows us to feel a ball. But only when our sight is combined with our senses of touch, balance AND movement do we learn to catch a moving ball. We remember that skill and can use it again and improve on it.
But if sensory integration is compromised, it can stop us being able to do things we used to be proficient in… or result in us getting stuck at a certain level, unable to reach our goals. Our bodies will naturally try to find coping strategies, but this simply places our systems under even more strain, leading to symptoms such as mental exhaustion, changes in behaviour, depression, food intolerances and eating disorders. It has now been established that many learning difficulties such as dyslexia, ADHD and autism are in fact expressions of severely impaired sensory integration.
Sensory integration can be disrupted by ‘epigenetic’ stress factors, trauma, emotional, physical or toxic shock, illness or extended periods of stress and therefore it is important to address the root causes in order to get (identifying the root cause can often help with finding the right solution and getting) you back on track.
First developed in the nineteen sixties, the sensory integration concept has been the focus of our research for 30 years using sensory integration assessment protocols, diagnostic questionnaires, standardised tests and baseline values of age-related norms across the therapeutic spectrum. This has made it possible for us to establish direct correlations between poor sensory integration and patterns of symptomatic behaviours – and to develop effective counter-measures.