• A cartoon purple eye to represent the visual sense

    Visual Sense

  • Orange ear symbol to represent the auditory sense

    Auditory Sense

  • Green circle with nose inside to represent the olfactory sense

    Olfactory Sense

  • Blue circle with tongue to represent the taste or gustatory sense

    Gustatory Sense

  • A hand with a pointing finger on a turquoise background to represent the touch or tactile sense

    Tactile Sense

  • Outline of a stomach to represent interoception sense

    Interoceptive Sense

  • A simple yellow icon of a person running to represent the proprioceptive sense

    Proprioceptive Sense

  • A person balancing on one leg to represent the vestibular sense

    Vestibular Sense

Sensory Processing

 

Sensory processing is how our body receives and understands information from the world around us. We gather information from what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell and our movements. We also get messages from inside our bodies from organs like our heart, stomach or lungs. Each sense then gives a message to our brain to tell us how to react or interact with what is happening and gives us clues to our emotions.

The sensations sent to our brains also link to our memories telling us whether something is safe or unsafe or whether we like or don’t like it. Over time we can then utilise these memories and think of different tools we can use to help in all sorts of different situations.

In some children the messages sent to the brain from the senses are not so easily interpreted. This could be from one sense or lots of senses. Therefore the brain tells them to react or interact in a way that is not expected. Children show this in different ways:

  1. The brain gets stuck and can’t focus on the information it needs.

  2. They feel like there is too much information and they need to run away from it all.

  3. They panic in response to the information such as cry or fight back.

  4. They ignore the information and shut down