Distortions of Sensory Perception

What I do at Snowdrop is to provide children and adults who experience developmental disabilities with appropriate stimulation, aiming to maximise their developmental progress.  Whilst generally speaking the difficulties faced by each individual with developmental problems are unique, many people do have some symptoms in common, which is why for instance we are able to use such classifying terms as 'cerebral palsy,' or 'autism,' or 'dyspraxia.'  However, the individual pattern and severity of symptoms are unique to each person.  This is why each programme I prescribe is different, - it is unique to the particular child or adult.

There are five sensory pathways into the brain and everything we learn in our lives is as a consequence of information flowing into the brain through these pathways.  Sometimes, due to brain injury, these pathways do not deliver information as they should, which can have dire consequences for the individual's development.

A Sensory Neuron.

• One or more of the sensory pathways, (vision, hearing, touch, smell or taste) may become hyper-sensitive, resulting in the world being experienced as to bright or loud, or the slightest touch being experienced as though it had been magnified.
• One or more of the pathways can become hypo-sensitive, resulting in the sensory messages simply not being perceived.
• One or more of the pathways can be 'inwardly tuned.'  (tuned into stimulation produced by the child's own body, such as a migraine sufferer might experience a visual aura).
• One or more of the pathways might be too 'widely tuned.'  The consequences of this are that the child is unable to pay selective attention to one stimulus within a noisy environment, so every sight, sound or tactile sensation within that environment are competing for the child's limited attentional resources.
• One or more of the pathways can be too 'narrowly tuned.'  This results in the child having difficulty in moving his attentional focus from one stimulus to another.  These are the individuals who seem to have a fixation on one object, such as a spinning top, or one particular sound or sensation.

My programmes are designed to help overcome these 'distortions' of sensory processing by providing an appropriately adapted sensory environment.  This will give the brain the opportunity to experience the stimulation it needs to re-organise it's structure and functioning; - to effectively use it's inherent quality of plasticity to re-wire itself.