Making Sense: A Guide to Sensory Issues

However, my physical symptoms exist whether I un-think them or not. It’s like telling someone with any other neurological condition—like multiple sclerosis or epilepsy—that their symptoms exist in their thoughts and chemical makeup: it’s just not true.

Each piece of sensory input—from the feel of our feet on the floor to the laugh of a stranger—cascades upon us without our consent, and we must constantly fight to keep our heads above water.

Research shows that 80-85% of our learning, perception, and cognition activities come to us through our vision.

white matter the subway of the brain. It connects the grey matter, which are the parts of the brain that do the processing—like that of sensory information. Different areas of the brain need to work together for us to do things like think, perceive, and learn, and the white matter helps with this. In typical brains, this movement of information fro

While receptor cells in our taste buds perform the physical act of sensing taste, it is once again the brain that assigns meaning to taste, thanks to three specialized taste nerves that send messages to the brain for translation.

While I spend a great deal of time running away from some input and running toward other input, I wish upon all the stars in our galaxy that I could feel secure in my body moving through space. It’s something people without sensory issues must take for granted—the simple pleasure of really being somewhere, not just in mind and soul but also in a we

The perception is completely unrelated to the sense organs, like the nose or the eyes, and related instead to the brain itself and how it interprets the sensory input it receives.

My sensory experiences are not a series of complex but mutable thoughts that I can work to wipe out from my consciousness, or a difference in chemistry that can be alleviated through medication. They’re simply the result of how my brain is built.

They found that, while typical brains without SPD, often called neurotypical by people in the sensory field, habituate to a noise or stimuli of some kind, meaning that they stop paying attention to it shortly after it starts, people with SPD never really do. It’s as if the sensory input is new each time it occurs.