Ahhhhh....sensory processing. Wheeeeee!
Okay, that's not helpful.
There are the traditional 5 senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell). Our nervous system takes about a bajillion of these signals in every second. Then a certain part of our brain filters out MOST of them...leaving about a thousand...then it shoots those messages to another part of our brain that filters out most of THOSE...leaving maybe 100. Then it shoots it to another part of our brain which decides which of those 100 it wants to send to our consciousness. Let's call them the top 10. And yes. I am making these numbers up. The actual numbers vary WILDLY from moment to moment...but the ratio is about correct.
Things that change make the top 10. Like moving from a warm house into the cold outside. Or stubbing your toe. Or what dinner tastes like.
Now...here is where things get dicey for me to explain...because I'm ADHD.
What I am sensing right this moment:
Feeling:
- The keyboard keys on my fingers...and the way that they're slightly rounded...unless I miss slightly.
- The way the flesh of my palm is folded slightly.
- That my left eye is slightly is slightly dry
- The air against my skin
- The way my lips are touching my teeth
- A vague itch on the side of my nose
- What the inside of my clothes feel like
- That there's still fluid in my right lung, about 1 1/2 inches deep
- The thong of my flip flop on my right foot, because I've shoved my foot forward and haven't bothered to move it, because the pressure againt the thong is interesting feeling.
- The beating of my heart...radiating only about 6 inches
- The blood flowing through some of the major arteries and a few areas of lesser arterioles.
- The temperature of the air
- How my ears are warmer then the rest of my body, probably because they were colder before
- The coldness of the leather on my ankle from the chair
- The way my eyelashes feel when they touch when I blink (kind of a round, bouncy feeling, hard to describe)
- How my hair feels (actually, which direction it's falling from the follicle....in a general way, not from EACH follicle,...and how it feels on the back of my neck, on my ears, and the strands near my face)
Seeing (while looking solely at the screen, without taking my eyes off of it):
- The screen
- The keyboard
- My dog
- The cords under the desk
- The windows behind and to my left
- Cars driving on the road out that window
- The ripples of light and shadow that get cast when the cars drive under the street lights.
- Ditto when the wind blows the magnolia outside.
- Colors from my sons artwork vaguely off to the left
- The way that they light and shadows are contrasting
- My eyelashes
- My nose
- My cheeks
Hearing is an equally long list, although RIGHT this MOMENT smell and taste are pretty short.
So this is dicey...because
A) I'm in a darkened, quiet room in my house, curled up writing this response (aka NOTHING else is going on)so the "list" is really MUCH shorter then it would usually be...plus I condensed it anyway. I took off about half for sake of space, and just did general headings...not all the details that go along with each. For example...I can feel about 10 things that have to do with how my pants feel...and that's only a PART of feeling my clothes.
- and -
B) Because *I'M TOLD* most people don't notice all those things all the time. At least, not without thinking about it.
People with ADHD, do. All the time. And we're a step or two down from people with REAL sensory stuff going on...because while we NOTICE all of it...people with sensory issues have mental and emotional reactions to those stimuli.
I can imagine, of course. Drinking alcohol gets rid of about 75% of my awareness of the world. Medications designed for ADHD get rid of about 99.99 percent (all the color and laughter and magic goes out of the world...everything seems to lose it's life and sparkle). On the opposite side of the spectrum: Many many years ago (back when god was a boy) I learned from hallucinogens that I'm only aware of maybe 1% of the sensory information that my brain is usually filtering out. Yowza.
So people with "sensory stuff", have something gone wrong with the processing, distribution, identification, or the emotional reactions tied to what makes the top 10. (Just for example...very few people enjoy pain...we have an emotional reaction tied to pain, and it's usually "Noooooooo!" or %$!#*@^!!. People who get serotonin happy from pain are true Masochists. Most of us, not so much. Same token, most of us who LIKE the flavor of a cheese like it cubed, shredded, melted...but a fairly common sensory thing it tied to food texture. Cubed cheese = WONDERFUL...same cheese shredded=liquid fire/or dog poop/or sandpaper. ADHD people notice the texture and play around with it in their mouths/fingers, sensory issue people can literally have a different physiological reaction to each texture. Most normal people: eat the cheese.)
Now, that "gone wrong" thing (especially in children), can just be the brain LEARNING how to processes, separate, distinguish, discard, pass on, & react. In fact, that's usually the case.
All of us can relate. Who hasn't suddenly felt overwhelmed at some point in their lives? Sensory overload, on a mild scale merely produces uncomfortable fear/nausea/panic. In the extreme form...it can shut our bodies off. Think electrical torture. That's a stronger form of sensory overload. It's what a lot of autistic kids/adults have to deal with. Certain impulses (like, say from cubed cheese) send the same message to the brain as holding onto a fork and sticking it in a socket.
If your daughter's therapist says she has sensory stuff going on...it's probably in the milder form (unless she's had seizures or seizure like attacks?),...and it's PROBABLY something she'll "outgrow". AKA, learn to cope with what her brain doesn't learn to filter. So, too, she could ALSO just be lucky and be ADHD...and just doesn't know what to do with all of that information yet. All that info IS one reason why so many ADHD folk are artists, scientists, or in medicine. We're born observers. Heck. We can't STOP.
There are a TON of coping mechanisms for sensory issues. I will refer you back to your therapist for some good books on the subject.
:)
Hoping this wasn't another kind of overload,
Z.