Sensory Development Quotes

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)

Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of 'strangeness'; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness.

We are thus faced with the following question: Why should an organ like our brain, with the sensorial system attached to it, of necessity consist of an enormous number of atoms, in order that its physically changing state should be in close and intimate correspondence with a highly developed thought?

Let go and let in. When we avoid prejudging our sources of information, we become more receptive to what they have to offer. If we come to listening with a blank slate, our environment can write on it what we need to hear. Similarly, if our mental and sensory channels are open, there’s more room to import energy and information.

Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting—intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one’s own experience and sensations, to make one’s self heard and seen. Talent alone is not enough. Character and ethics, a point of view about the world in which you live and an education, can and must be acquired and developed.

People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus.

There are many things we don’t understand, and many ways to unlock the brain and maximize function. Don’t ever let anybody tell you it can’t be done.

I believe the only real limits in life, are the ones we put on ourselves and/or others….so I say forget the limits and “go for it.” You may be surprised at what is really possible!

Coghill has shown that the motor patterns of the animal develop prior to the development of sensory innervation.

If nature didn't whittle down your network to a smaller number of strongly forged connections, you would never become an adult. You would remain a permanent child, frozen in sensory overload.

Further evidence for the pathogenic role of dissociation has come from a largescale clinical and community study of traumatized people conducted by a task force of the American Psychiatric Association. In this study, people who reported having dissociative symptoms were also quite likely to develop persistent somatic symptoms for which no physical cause could be found. They also frequently engaged in self-destructive attacks on their own bodies. The results of these investigations validate the century-old insight that traumatized people relive in their bodies the moments of terror that they can not describe in words. Dissociation appears to be the mechanism by which intense sensory and emotional experiences are disconnected from the social domain of language and memory, the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.

if we were organisms so sensitive that a single atom, or even a few atoms, could make a perceptible impression on our senses – Heavens, what would life be like! To stress one point: an organism of that kind would most certainly not be capable of developing the kind of orderly thought which, after passing through a long sequence of earlier stages, ultimately results in forming, among many other ideas, the idea of an atom. Even though we select this one point, the following considerations would essentially apply also to the functioning of organs other than the brain and the sensorial system.

Genie In 1970 a child called Genie was admitted to a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She was thirteen years old and had spent most of her life tied to a chair in a small closed room. Her father was intolerant of any kind of noise and had beaten the child whenever she made a sound. There had been no radio or television, and Genie’s only other human contact was with her mother who was forbidden to spend more than a few minutes with the child to feed her. Genie had spent her whole life in a state of physical, sensory, social and emotional deprivation. As might be expected, Genie was unable to use language when she was first brought into care. However, within a short period of time, she began to respond to the speech of others, to try to imitate sound and to communicate. Her syntax remained very simple. However, the fact that she went on to develop an ability to speak and understand a fairly large number of English words provides some evidence against the notion that language cannot be acquired at all after the critical period.

Haekel's reasoning is simple: humans are nature, they are part of, and a result of, evolution. Our actions and our thoughts are products of this evolution. Accordingly, when humans come to know something, ultimately it reveals their own nature. Our knowledge -- which has developed in and is subject to the laws of nature -- is in itself nature (and according to Haeckel, nothing more.) The draftsman, his sensory organs, his motor activity, are results of a development with which, in the end, nature merely represents itself.

But one cannot rely solely on games and art to improve the quality of life. To achieve control over what happens in the mind, one can draw upon an almost infinite range of opportunities for enjoyment—for instance, through the use of physical and sensory skills ranging from athletics to music to Yoga (chapter 5), or through the development of symbolic skills such as poetry, philosophy, or mathematics

The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment.

Modulation and processing of the range of sensory experiences allows for social engagement and attachment to others. A person who is easily overwhelmed by sounds, touch, movement, or visual stimulation may avoid interactions with persons or situations that are highly stimulating. In contrast, the person who does not process sensory input unless it is very intense may develop a pattern of thrill seeking, high stimulation, and risky behavior.

The Greek thinkers was no way of bridging the gap between the rectilinear and the curvilinear which would at the same time satisfy their strict demands of mathematical rigor and appeal to the clear evidence of sensory experience.

However, traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves. The more people try to push away and ignore internal warning signs, the more likely they are to take over and leave them bewildered, confused, and ashamed. People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic — they develop a fear of fear itself.

I’d gone from not noticing Lucas ever to being consumed by noticing him constantly. I developed the sensory awareness of an apex predator: at any time I could tell you where Lucas was in the common room, without you ever seeing my eyes flicker toward him.

At parties, people no longer showed off their new gadgets, jewelry, or hairstyles, but prosthetic cochleas that improved the sense of balance, artificial muscles with augmented contraction characteristics, prosthetic limbs that obeyed mental directions, or updated firmware that enhanced sensory organs. SBT developed a revolutionary substance for mediating between the biological and the electronic worlds. Extracted from the gladii of squids, this modified chitosan complex could convert the biological ion flow that carried brain signals into electric currents that could be deciphered by machines, thereby seamlessly forming a feedback loop between the nervous system and the prosthesis. The invention had expanded the definition of the boundary of the body beyond imagination.

Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines.

Trance helps depotentiate our old programs and gives us an opportunity to learn something new. The only reason why we cannot produce an anesthesia at will, for example, is because we don’t know how to give up our habitual generalized reality orientation that emphasizes the importance of pain and gives it primacy in consciousness. But if we allowed young children to experiment with their sensory perceptual processes in a fun way, they might easily develop skills with anaesthesia that could be very useful when they needed it. This would be an interesting piece of research, indeed.

Communicatory inputs from the world can occur through any of the six primary sensory modalities at any time. The important thing is to first develop the capacity to feel the deeper meanings inside any of the sensory modalities, second to seek their meanings, and third to craft congruent responses.

Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy, as well.

Class-Z mnestics are the last word in biochemical memory fortification. Class-Z mnestics permanently destroy the subject's ability to forget. The result is perfect eidetic memory and perfect immunity to arbitrarily strong antimemetic interference. The dose is taking effect now. Wheeler didn't read the book because she already knew every word of it. She knows everything that's about to happen to her. She can already feel her mind hardening, like steel, and the developing symptoms of extreme sensory overload. She can see everything.

the hippocampus is perhaps the central organ in the brain responsible for processing sensory data and acting as a gateway for inflows. As Kisley et al. note: “The cholinergic innervation of the hippocampus, which is crucial for intact sensory gating, exhibits extensive remodeling during pre- and early postnatal development.”4 It displays a great deal of plasticity in response to incoming sensory flows; the more it works with meaning and the more sensory input it is sensitive to, the more it shifts its neural structure as it sensorally interacts with the world.

It is possible, just as it is with the auditory training of musicians, to begin using the feeling sense actively. This will increase neuronal development in the hippocampal and the cardiovascular (heart) system and with practice, over time, increase sensitivity to tiny modulations in that sensory flow. Sensitivity to the tiniest shifts in feeling will develop, just as they do in musicians with sound complexes. And, with experience, the ability to determine the meanings inside those feelings will become a reliable skill. In other words, it becomes possible to immediately know the intent of the dog as soon as it is seen/nonkinesthetically felt.

Buddhist meditation takes this untrained, everyday mind as its natural starting point, and it requires the development of one particular attentional posture—of naked, or bare, attention. Defined as “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,”1 bare attention takes this unexamined mind and opens it up, not by trying to change anything but by observing the mind, emotions, and body the way they are. It is the fundamental tenet of Buddhist psychology that this kind of attention is, in itself, healing: that by the constant application of this attentional strategy, all of the Buddha’s insights can be realized for oneself. As mysterious as the literature on meditation can seem, as elusive as the koans of the Zen master sometimes sound, there is but one underlying instruction that is critical to Buddhist thought. Common to all schools of thought, from Sri Lanka to Tibet, the unifying theme of the Buddhist approach is this remarkable imperative: “Pay precise attention, moment by moment, to exactly what you are experiencing, right now, separating out your reactions from the raw sensory events.” This is what is meant by bare attention: just the bare facts, an exact registering, allowing things to speak for themselves as if seen for the first time, distinguishing any reactions from the core event.

If Marzulli's anatomical observation of the elongated skulls of the Paracas were right in that they are completely devoid of a sagittal suture (i.e., Scaphocephaly), then such a desired physically induced mutation could be perceived as a medical procedure aimed at increasing the transfer of perceptual, sensory, motor and cognitive information between the two hemispheres; this was possibly done to prevent each hemisphere from processing information outside the awareness of the other. In essence, this meant that the operation was intended to prevent the brain from producing and developing any margin of a double consciousness as normal humans are equipped with; culminating thereby in some form of a unified consciousness.

Nevertheless I’d like to end this chapter on a positive note about how research into how humans acquire language is leading to better informed, conscious parents. Though there has been a cultural misunderstanding that a baby’s brain is not developed enough to learn and comprehend language, nothing could be further from the truth. The acquisition of language plays a fundamental role in exercising an infant’s brain and shaping its organization, neural connectivity, and intelligence. Research on the fetal brain’s ability to acquire and download environmental experiences in the womb reveal that the nervous system’s sensory input mechanisms, such as hearing, develop long before the system’s motor outputs—in this case, coordinated muscular control needed for speech. Consequently, the brain’s potential to learn and understand language is not dependent on the infant’s ability to speak.

I grabbed a handful of tarragon and closed my eyes, inhaling its sweet fragrance. I could almost feel my grandmother next to me, smell the aromas embedded into her poppy-print apron, taste her creamy veloutés. Thanks to her, my skills in the kitchen started developing from the age of seven. I'd learned how to chop, slice, and dice without cutting my fingers, to sauté, fry, and grill, pairing flavors and taming them into submission. Just as I'd experienced with my grandmother's meals, when people ate my creations, I wanted them to think "now this is love"- while engaging all of the five senses. For me, cooking was the way I expressed myself, each dish a balance of flavors and ingredients representing my emotions- sweet, sour, salty, smoky, spicy-hot, and even bitter. My inspiration as a chef was to give people sensorial experiences, to bring them back to times of happiness, to let them relive their youth, or to awaken their minds.

   Æsthetic and moral education are closely related to this sensory education. Multiply the sensations, and develop the capacity of appreciating fine differences in stimuli and we refine the sensibility and multiply man’s pleasures.    Beauty lies in harmony, not in contrast; and harmony is refinement; therefore, there must be a fineness of the senses if we are to appreciate harmony. The æsthetic harmony of nature is lost upon him who has coarse senses. The world to him is narrow and barren. In life about us, there exist inexhaustible fonts of æsthetic enjoyment, before which men pass as insensible as the brutes seeking their enjoyment in those sensations which are crude and showy, since they are the only ones accessible to them.    Now, from the enjoyment of gross pleasures, vicious habits very often spring. Strong stimuli, indeed, do not render acute, but blunt the senses, so that they require stimuli more and more accentuated and more and more gross.

A further result of the abstracting attitude of consciousness, and one whose significance will become more apparent in the course of our exposition, is that the unconscious develops a compensating attitude. For the more the relation to the object is restricted by abstraction (because too many “experiences” and “laws” are made), the more insistently does a craving for the object develop in the unconscious, and this finally expresses itself in consciousness as a compulsive sensuous tie to the object. The sensuous relation to the object then takes the place of a feeling relation, which is lacking, or rather suppressed, because of abstraction. Characteristically, therefore, Schiller regards the senses, and not feelings, as the way to divinity. His ego makes use of thinking, but his affections, his feelings, make use of sensation. Thus for him the schism is between spirituality in the form of thinking, and sensuousness in the form of affectivity or feeling. For the extravert the situation is reversed: his relation to the object is highly developed, but his world of ideas is sensory and concrete.

The auditory cortex, as an example, processes the sound inputs that have not already been gated earlier in the stream. It specifically works with tone, pitch, harmony, loudness, and beat patterning or timing. In people that use auditory inputs as a primary or major area of sensory processing musicians for instance there is much less gating of sound in the deeper levels of the brain than in nonmusicians. In consequence, much more sound input reaches the auditory cortex. Because the auditory cortex is continually used to work with larger amounts of sound inflows (with more subtlety), it becomes highly developed and shows tremendous plasticity, that is, continuous new neuronal development. Frances Densmore, for example, the ethnomusicologist who recorded thousands of Native plant songs in the early twentieth century, could perceive pitch differentiations as tiny as 1/32 in deviation. (She had as well total recall and prefect pitch.) The more a sensory modality is consciously used to analyze incoming sensory inflows, the more sensitive it becomes, and the larger the neural network within it becomes.

More Activities to Develop Sensory-Motor Skills Sensory processing is the foundation for fine-motor skills, motor planning, and bilateral coordination. All these skills improve as the child tries the following activities that integrate the sensations. FINE-MOTOR SKILLS Flour Sifting—Spread newspaper on the kitchen floor and provide flour, scoop, and sifter. (A turn handle is easier to manipulate than a squeeze handle, but both develop fine-motor muscles in the hands.) Let the child scoop and sift. Stringing and Lacing—Provide shoelaces, lengths of yarn on plastic needles, or pipe cleaners, and buttons, macaroni, cereal “Os,” beads, spools, paper clips, and jingle bells. Making bracelets and necklaces develops eye-hand coordination, tactile discrimination, and bilateral coordination. Egg Carton Collections—The child may enjoy sorting shells, pinecones, pebbles, nuts, beans, beads, buttons, bottle caps, and other found objects and organizing them in the individual egg compartments. Household Tools—Picking up cereal pieces with tweezers; stretching rubber bands over a box to make a “guitar”; hanging napkins, doll clothes, and paper towels with clothespins; and smashing egg cartons with a mallet are activities that strengthen many skills.

My general philosophy regarding endurance contains four key points: 1. Build a great aerobic base. This essential physical and metabolic foundation helps accomplish several important tasks: it prevents injury and maintains a balanced physical body; it increases fat burning for improved stamina, weight loss, and sustained energy; and it improves overall health in the immune and hormonal systems, the intestines and liver, and throughout the body. 2. Eat well. Specific foods influence the developing aerobic system, especially the foods consumed in the course of a typical day. Overall, diet can significantly influence your body’s physical, chemical, and mental state of fitness and health. 3. Reduce stress. Training and competition, combined with other lifestyle factors, can be stressful and adversely affect performance, cause injuries, and even lead to poor nutrition because they can disrupt the normal digestion and absorption of nutrients. 4. Improve brain function. The brain and entire nervous system control virtually all athletic activity, and a healthier brain produces a better athlete. Improved brain function occurs from eating well, controlling stress, and through sensory stimulation, which includes proper training and optimal breathing.

Finally, Tononi argues that the neural correlate of consciousness in the human brain resembles a grid-like structure. One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is how visual, auditory, and touch perceptual spaces map in a topographic manner onto visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortices. Most excitatory pyramidal cells and inhibitory interneurons have local axons strongly connected to their immediate neighbours, with the connections probability decreasing with distance. Topographically organized cortical tissue, whether it develops naturally inside the skull or is engineered out of stem cells and grown in dishes, will have high intrinsic causal power. This tissue will feel like something, even if our intuition revels at the thought that cortical carpets, disconnected from all their inputs and outputs, can experience anything. But this is precisely what happens to each one of us when we close our eyes, go to sleep, and dream. We create a world that feels as real as the awake one, while devoid of sensory input and unable to move. Cerebral organoids or grid-like substances will not be conscious of love or hate, but of space.; of up, down, close by and far away and other spatial phenomenology distinctions. But unless provided with sophisticated motor outputs, they will be unable to do anything.

Just how important a close moment-to-moment connection between mother and infant can be was illustrated by a cleverly designed study, known as the “double TV experiment,” in which infants and mothers interacted via a closed-circuit television system. In separate rooms, infant and mother observed each other and, on “live feed,” communicated by means of the universal infant-mother language: gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions. The infants were happy during this phase of the experiment. “When the infants were unknowingly replayed the ‘happy responses’ from the mother recorded from the prior minute,” writes the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, “they still became as profoundly distressed as infants do in the classic ‘flat face’ experiments in which mothers-in-person gave no facial emotional response to their infant’s bid for attunement.” Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. All that was lacking in the instant video replay, during which infants saw their mother’s face unresponsive to the messages they, the infants, were sending out. This sharing of emotional spaces is called attunement. Emotional stress on the mother interferes with infant brain development because it tends to interfere with the attunement contact. Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional selfregulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at that moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb. Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill. As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. The muscles of smiling are exactly the same in each case, but the signals that set the smile muscles to work do not come from the same centers in the brain. As a consequence, those muscles respond differently to the signals, depending on their origin. This is why only very good actors can mimic a genuine, heartfelt smile. The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. Infants, particularly sensitive infants, intuit the difference between a parent’s real psychological states and her attempts to soothe and protect the infant by means of feigned emotional expressions. A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. The emotional sensory radar of the infant has not yet been scrambled. It reads feelings clearly. They cannot be hidden from the infant behind a screen of words, or camouflaged by well-meant but forced gestures. It is unfortunate but true that we grow far more stupid than that by the time we reach adulthood.

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

Suggestions to Develop Self-Help Skills Self-help skills improve along with sensory processing. The following suggestions may make your child’s life easier—and yours, too! DRESSING • Buy or make a “dressing board” with a variety of snaps, zippers, buttons and buttonholes, hooks and eyes, buckles and shoelaces. • Provide things that are not her own clothes for the child to zip, button, and fasten, such as sleeping bags, backpacks, handbags, coin purses, lunch boxes, doll clothes, suitcases, and cosmetic cases. • Provide alluring dress-up clothes with zippers, buttons, buckles, and snaps. Oversized clothes are easiest to put on and take off. • Eliminate unnecessary choices in your child’s bureau and closet. Clothes that are inappropriate for the season and that jam the drawers are sources of frustration. • Put large hooks inside closet doors at the child’s eye level so he can hang up his own coat and pajamas. (Attach loops to coats and pajamas on the outside so they won’t irritate the skin.) • Supply cellophane bags for the child to slip her feet into before pulling on boots. The cellophane prevents shoes from getting stuck and makes the job much easier. • Let your child choose what to wear. If she gets overheated easily, let her go outdoors wearing several loose layers rather than a coat. If he complains that new clothes are stiff or scratchy, let him wear soft, worn clothes, even if they’re unfashionable. • Comfort is what matters. • Set out tomorrow’s clothes the night before. Encourage the child to dress himself. Allow for extra time, and be available to help. If necessary, help him into clothes but let him do the finishing touch: Start the coat zipper but let him zip it up, or button all but one of his buttons. Keep a stool handy so the child can see herself in the bathroom mirror. On the sink, keep a kid-sized hairbrush and toothbrush within arm’s reach. Even if she resists brushing teeth and hair, be firm. Some things in life are nonnegotiable.

Change the material environment by altering the availability of amino acids or fats or carbohydrates in the diet of young animal, and the gene-environment interactions that occur will change as well, potentially affecting the structural development of the brain or the activity of hormone-releasing organs, with assorted behavioral consequences for the affected individual. Alter the experiential environment by changing the sensory inputs from the physical environment or from social interactions with other animals, and behavioral development will shift as well.

Brain Life began around 3.5 billion years ago. Multicelled creatures first appeared about 650 million years ago. (When you get a cold, remember that microbes had nearly a three-billion-year head-start!) By the time the earliest jellyfish arose about 600 million years ago, animals had grown complex enough that their sensory and motor systems needed to communicate with each other; thus the beginnings of neural tissue. As animals evolved, so did their nervous systems, which slowly developed a central headquarters in the form of a brain.

Do recall how you behaved as a child: Maybe your child is just like you once were. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!) Ask yourself what you would have liked to make your childhood easier and more pleasurable. More trips to the playground, free time, or cuddling? Fewer demands? Lower expectations? Try saying, “When I was a kid and life got rough, I liked to climb trees. How about you?” Do respect your child’s needs, even if they seem unusual: “You sure do like a tight tuck-in! There, now you’re as snug as a bug in a rug.” Or, “I’ll stand in front of you while we’re on the escalator. I won’t let you fall.” Do respect your child’s fears, even if they seem senseless: “I see that your ball bounced near those big kids. I’ll go with you. Let’s hold hands.” Your reassurances will help her trust others. Do say “I love you”: Assure your child that you accept and value who she is. You cannot say “I love you” too often! Do follow your instincts: Your instincts will tell you that everyone needs to touch and be touchable, to move and be movable. If your child’s responses seem atypical, ask questions, get information, and follow up with appropriate action. Do listen when others express concerns: When teachers or caregivers suggest that your child’s behavior is unusual, you may react with denial or anger. But remember that they see your child away from home, among many other children. Their perspective is worth considering. Do educate yourself about typical child development: Read. Take parent education classes. Learn about invariable stages of human development, as well as variable temperaments and learning styles. It’s comforting to know that a wide variety of behaviors falls within the normal range. Then, you’ll find it easier to differentiate between typical and atypical behavior. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a six-year-old is just a six-year-old! Do seek professional help: SPD is a problem that a child can’t overcome alone. Parents and teachers can’t “cure” a child, just as a child can’t cure himself. Early intervention is crucial. Do keep your cool: When your child drives you crazy, collect your thoughts before responding, especially if you are angry, upset, or unpleasantly surprised. A child who is out of control needs the calm reassurance of someone who is in control. She needs a grown-up. Do take care of yourself: When you’re having a hard day, take a break! Hire a babysitter and go for a walk, read a book, take a bath, dine out, make love. Nobody can be expected to give another person undivided attention, and still cope.

Perceptual motor therapy provides integrated movement experiences that remediate gross-motor, fine-motor, and visual discrimination problems. Activities, including sensory-input techniques, stimulate left/right brain communication to help the child interpret incoming information to the nervous system. Goals are to develop more mature patterns of response to specific stimuli, improve motor skills and balance, and stimulate alternate routes to memory and sequencing for those children who do not respond to the methods taught in the conventional classroom.

Activities to Develop the Tactile Sense Rub-a-Dub-Dub—Encourage the child to rub a variety of textures against her skin. Offer different kinds of soap (oatmeal soap, shaving cream, lotion soap) and scrubbers (loofah sponges, thick washcloths, foam pot-scrubbers, plastic brushes). Water Play—Fill the kitchen sink with sudsy water and unbreakable pitchers and bottles, turkey basters, sponges, eggbeaters, and toy water pumps. Or, fill a washtub with water and toys and set it on the grass. Pouring and measuring are educational and therapeutic, as well as high forms of entertainment. Water Painting—Give the child a bucket of water and paintbrush to paint the porch steps, the sidewalk, the fence, or her own body. Or, provide a squirt bottle filled with clean water (because the squirts often go in the child’s mouth). Finger Painting—Let the sensory craver wallow in this literally “sensational” activity. Encourage (but don’t force) the sensory avoider to stick a finger into the goop. For different tactile experiences, mix sand into the paint, or place a blob of shaving cream, peanut butter, or pudding on a plastic tray. Encourage him to draw shapes, letters, and numbers. If he “messes up,” he can erase the error with his hand and begin again. Finger Drawing—With your finger, “draw” a shape, letter, number, or design on the child’s back or hand. Ask the child to guess what it is and then to pass the design on to another person. Sand Play—In a sandbox, add small toys (cars, trucks, people, and dinosaurs), which the child can rearrange, bury, and rediscover. Instead of sand, use dried beans, rice, pasta, cornmeal, popcorn, and mud. Making mud pies and getting messy are therapeutic, too.

Activities to Develop the Vestibular System Rolling—Encourage your child to roll across the floor and down a grassy hill. Swinging—Encourage (but never force) the child to swing. Gentle, linear movement is calming. Fast, high swinging in an arc is more stimulating. If the child has gravitational insecurity, start him on a low swing so his feet can touch the ground, or hold him on your lap. Two adults can swing him in a blanket, too. Spinning—At the playground, let the child spin on the tire swing or merry-go-round. Indoors, offer a swivel chair or Sit ’n Spin. Monitor the spinning, as the child may become easily overstimulated. Don’t spin her without her permission! Sliding—How many ways can a child swoosh down a slide? Sitting up, lying down, frontwards, backwards, holding on to the sides, not holding on, with legs straddling the sides, etc. Riding Vehicles—Trikes, bikes, and scooters help children improve their balance, motor planning, and motor coordination. Walking on Unstable Surfaces—A sandy beach, a playground “clatter bridge,” a grassy meadow, and a waterbed are examples of shaky ground that require children to adjust their bodies as they move. Rocking—Provide a rocking chair for your child to get energized, organized, or tranquilized.

The vestibular system tells us about up and down and whether we are upright or not. It tells us where our heads and bodies are in relation to the earth’s surface. It sends sensory messages about balance and movement from the neck, eyes, and body to the CNS for processing and then helps generate muscle tone so we can move smoothly and efficiently. This sense tells us whether we are moving or standing still, and whether objects are moving or motionless in relation to our body. It also informs us what direction we are going in, and how fast we are going. This is extremely useful information should we need to make a fast getaway! Indeed, the fundamental functions of fight, flight, and foraging for food depend on accurate information from the vestibular system. Dr. Ayres writes that the “system has basic survival value at one of the most primitive levels, and such significance is reflected in its role in sensory integration.” The receptors for vestibular sensations are hair cells in the inner ear, which is like a “vestibule” for sensory messages to pass through. The inner-ear receptors work something like a carpenter’s level. They register every movement we make and every change in head position—even the most subtle. Some inner-ear structures receive information about where our head and body are in space when we are motionless, or move slowly, or tilt our head in any linear direction—forward, backward, or to the side. As an example of how this works, stand up in an ordinary biped, or two-footed, position. Now, close your eyes and tip your head way to the right. With your eyes closed, resume your upright posture. Open your eyes. Are you upright again, where you want to be? Your vestibular system did its job. Other structures in the inner ear receive information about the direction and speed of our head and body when we move rapidly in space, on the diagonal or in circles. Stand up and turn around in a circle or two. Do you feel a little dizzy? You should. Your vestibular system tells you instantly when you have had enough of this rotary stimulation. You will probably regain your balance in a moment. What stimulates these inner ear receptors? Gravity! According to Dr. Ayres, gravity is “the most constant and universal force in our lives.” It rules every move we make. Throughout evolution, we have been refining our responses to gravitational pull. Our ancient ancestors, the first fish, developed gravity receptors, on either side of their heads, for three purposes: 1) to keep upright, 2) to provide a sense of their own motions so they could move efficiently, and 3) to detect potentially threatening movements of other creatures through the vibrations of ripples in the water. Millions of years later, we still have gravity receptors to serve the same purposes—except now vibrations come through air rather than water.

Activities to Develop the Proprioceptive System Lifting and Carrying Heavy Loads—Have the child pick up and carry soft-drink bottles to the picnic; laundry baskets upstairs; or grocery bags, filled with nonbreakables, into the house. He can also lug a box of books, a bucket of blocks, or a pail of water from one spot to another. Pushing and Pulling—Have the child push or drag grocery bags from door to kitchen. Let him push the stroller, vacuum, rake, shove heavy boxes, tow a friend on a sled, or pull a loaded wagon. Hard muscular work jazzes up the muscles. Hanging by the Arms—Mount a chinning bar in a doorway, or take your child to the park to hang from the monkey bars. When she suspends her weight from her hands, her stretching muscles send sensory messages to her brain. When she shifts from hand to hand as she travels underneath the monkey bars, she is developing upper-body strength. Hermit Crab—Place a large bag of rice or beans on the child’s back and let her move around with a heavy “shell” on her back. Joint Squeeze—Put one hand on the child’s forearm and the other on his upper arm; slowly press toward and away from his elbow. Repeat at his knee and shoulder. Press down on his head. Straighten and bend his fingers, wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, and toes. These extension and flexion techniques provide traction and compression to his joints and are effective when he’s stuck in tight spaces, such as church pews, movie theaters, cars, trains, and especially airplanes where the air pressure changes. Body Squeeze—Sit on the floor behind your child, straddling him with your legs. Put your arms around his knees, draw them toward his chest, and squeeze hard. Holding tight, rock him forward and back.

Activities to Develop the Auditory System Simplify your language. Speak slowly, shorten your comments, abbreviate instructions, and repeat what you have said. Reinforce verbal messages with gestural communication: facial expressions, hand movements, and body language. Talk to your child while she dresses, eats, or bathes, to teach her words and concepts, such as nouns (sunglasses, casserole), body parts (thumb, buttocks), prepositions (around, through), adjectives (juicy, soapy), time (yesterday, later), categories (vegetables/fruits), actions (zip, scrub), and emotions (pleased, sorry). Share your own thoughts. Model good speech and communication skills. Even if the child has trouble responding verbally, she may understand what you say. Take the time to let your child respond to your words and express his thoughts. Don’t interrupt, rush, or pressure him to talk. Be an active listener. Pay attention. Look your child in the eye when she speaks. Show her that her thoughts interest you. Help your child communicate more clearly. If you catch one word, say, “Tell me more about the truck.” If you can’t catch his meaning, have him show you by gesturing. Reward her comments with smiles, hugs, and verbal praise, such as, “That’s a great idea!” Your positive feedback will encourage her to strive to communicate. (Don’t say, “Good talking,” which means little to the child and implies that all you care about is words, rather than the message the child is trying to get across.) Use rhythm and beat to improve the child’s memory. Give directions or teach facts with a “piggyback song,” substituting your words to a familiar tune. Example: To the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” sing, “Now it’s time to wash your face, Brush your teeth, comb your hair, Now it’s time to put on clothes, So start with underwear!” Encourage your child to pantomime while listening to stories and poems, or to music without words. Read to your child every day!

Activities to Develop the Visual System Making Shapes—Let your child draw or form shapes, letters, and numbers in different materials, such as playdough, finger paint, shaving cream, soap foam, sand, clay, string, pudding, or pizza dough. Mazes and Dot-to-Dot Activities—Draw mazes on paper, the sidewalk, or the beach. Have the child follow the mazes with his finger, a toy car, a crayon, a marker, or chalk. On graph paper, make dot-to-dot patterns for the child to follow. Peg Board—Have the child reproduce your design or make his own. Cutting Activities—Provide paper and scissors and have your child cut fringe and strips. Draw curved lines on the paper for her to cut. Cutting playdough is fun, too. Tracking Activities—Lie on your backs outside and watch birds or airplanes, just moving your eyes while keeping your heads still. Jigsaw Puzzles! Block Building!!

Mathematics is unable to specify whether motion is continuous, for it deals merely with hypothetical relations and can make its variable continuous or discontinuous at will. The paradoxes of Zeno are consequences of the failure to appreciate this fact and of the resulting lack of a precise specification of the problem. The former is a matter of scientific description a posteriori, whereas the latter is a matter solely of mathematical definition a priori. The former may consequently suggest that motion be defined mathematically in terms of continuous variable, but cannot, because of the limitations of sensory perception, prove that it must be so defined.

As the sensations of motion and discreteness led to the abstract notions of the calculus, so may sensory experience continue thus to suggest problem for the mathematician, and so may she in turn be free to reduce these to the basic formal logical relationships involved. Thus only may be fully appreciated the twofold aspect of mathematics: as the language of a descriptive interpretation of the relationships discovered in natural phenomena, and as a syllogistic elaboration of arbitrary premise.

It is within this network of intermediary neurons, arranged end-to-end and side-by-side between our sensory nerve endings and our motor units, that all of our tone levels, reflexes, gestures, habits, tendencies, feelings, attitudes, postures, styles have their genesis. It is called the internuncial net, and it has come into its fullest flower in the human being. [Internuncios were official messengers for the Pope, taking information and bringing back responses from the various courts of Europe.) This net composes roughly ninety percent of our nervous systems, including the entire spinal cord and the brain. It is nothing less than the total activity of this internuncial net which influences the responses of the motor units. Let us recall our stiff old man who was anaesthetized for surgery. The anaesthesia had no direct effect on either sensory endings or motor units; rather, it interrupted the normal flow of signals in the internuncial network in the brain. The result was flaccid, unresponsive muscles, and a blanking out of all sensation produced by the scalpel and the probe. It is only by influencing the flow of impulses through the vast internuncial net that we can have any effect upon tone, habit, and behavior. The conditions which direct that flow into specific patterns have been evolved through the handling of particular qualities and amounts of sensory experience and the repetitions of specific appropriate motor responses. One of the readiest means we have of actually influencing—rather than just temporarily interrupting—the conditions within the net is the introduction of more and more positive sensory experience, which elicits new kinds of motor responses, and can thus form the basis for the development of new habits, new conditions, new patterns of neural flow. The complexities of the internuncial net are forbidding. The suggestion that bodywork might in some way make significant and lasting changes in its function may sound like the ravings of a necromancer turned amateur neurosurgeon. We know so very little, and would presume to do so much. And yet we do know that very simple means can produce remarkable and demonstrably repeatable results in this fantastically complicated network. Infants who do not receive adequate physical stimulation die or are dwarfed and deformed. Laboratory rats who are handled on a daily basis develop markedly stronger resistance to fatal diseases, even to the loss of vital organs. Between these two extremes is a wide spectrum of quantity and quality of touching, all of which must certainly affect the health of the organism if touch in the orphanage and in the laboratory can be proven to be so crucial.

The numbers of sensory endings and motor neurons in the periphery have multiplied considerably as fishes and birds and mammals developed, producing sharper and more complete sensory impressions, and making possible a finer and finer control of the musculature. But the essential features of the peripheral system have not greatly altered. In them the basic rudiments of the primitive nervous system are still preserved, “a mechanism by which a muscular movement can be initiated by some change in peripheral sensation, say, an object touching the skin.” What has changed enormously is the relationship between these ancient sensory and motor elements. In the hydra sensation and motor response were united in a single cell; in the jellyfish these two functions were divided into two specialized cells; and in the flatworm an intermediate network of cells was placed between them. The two more primitive elements have since become increasingly separated as the internuncial net has increased in bulk and sophistication, and their synaptic connections, once direct, have been distanced by more and more modifying circuits.

As a sensory device, the tendon organ is a close partner to the muscle spindle in the assessment of the specific activity of every one of my alpha motor units. The anulospiral element of the spindle measures the length of a muscle’s fibers, and the speed with which that length is changing. Adding to this information, the Golgi tendon organs measure the tensions that are developed as a result of these changing lengths. The degree of distortion in the parallel zig-zag collagen bundles is a precise gauge of the force with which a muscle is actually pulling on the bone to which it is attached. Such a gauge is really necessary in order to fully and accurately assess the net amount of work force actually being delivered by a muscle, as opposed to merely knowing now much and how fast it is lengthening or shortening. I can shorten my bicep exactly the same distance at exactly the same speed, whether there is a book in my hand or not, and my spindles will register identical information in either case. It is only the differing stress placed upon the tendon organ during the gesture which announces and evaluates the added weight of the book.

In the 1970s, UCLA psychologist Eric Holman discovered that certain sweetened substances could make rodents prefer certain foods by virtue of their presence. For instance, by adding a saccharin to either a banana- or an almond-flavored solution, he was able to make rats prefer the taste of bananas or almonds, respectively, a process known as “flavor nutrient conditioning.” In recent years that work has been picked up with humans. Maltodextrin, a glucose polymer, is imperceptible to most of us. It doesn’t taste sweet. In fact, it doesn’t taste like anything. For it to activate the sweet receptors in the brain, the body must first break it down into glucose. If we mix it into another food, we don’t realize there’s a sugar present, but we still develop a preference for that flavor. In one study, people who tasted foods with maltodextrin mixed in would reliably choose the flavor that had been associated with the polymer in subsequent tests. They had been trained to prefer one food over another by a sort of sensory trickery. Imagine dusting a child’s broccoli florets with maltodextrin and transforming a disliked vegetable into a favorite.

As nervous systems developed, they acquired an elaborate network of peripheral probes—the peripheral nerves that are distributed to every parcel of the body’s interior and to its entire surface, as well as to specialized sensory devices that enable seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Nervous systems also acquired an elaborate collection of aggregated central processors in the central nervous system, conventionally called the brain.10 The latter includes (1) the spinal cord; (2) the brain stem and the closely related hypothalamus; (3) the cerebellum; (4) a number of large nuclei located above brain-stem level—in the thalamus, basal ganglia, and basal forebrain; and (5) the cerebral cortex, the most modern and sophisticated component of the system. These central processors manage learning and memory storage of signals of every possible sort and also manage the integration of these signals; they coordinate the execution of complex responses to inner states and incoming stimuli—a critical operation that includes drives, motivations, and emotions proper; and they manage the process of image manipulation that we otherwise know as thinking, imagining, reasoning, and decision making. Last, they manage the conversion of images and of their sequences into symbols and eventually into languages—coded sounds and gestures whose combinations can signify any object, quality, or action, and whose linkage is governed by a set of rules called grammar. Equipped with language, organisms can generate continuous translations of nonverbal to verbal items and build dual-track narratives of such items.

A Variation of Dr. Ayres’s “Four Levels of Sensory Integration” By the time a child is ready for preschool, the blocks for complex skill development should be in place. What are these blocks? • Ability to modulate touch sensations through the skin, especially unexpected, light touch, and to discriminate among the physical properties of objects by touching them (tactile sense), • Ability to adjust one’s body to changes in gravity, and to feel comfortable moving through space (vestibular sense), • Ability to be aware of one’s body parts (proprioceptive sense), • Ability to use the two sides of the body in a cooperative manner (bilateral coordination), and • Ability to interact successfully with the physical environment; to plan, organize, and carry out a sequence of unfamiliar actions; to do what one needs and wants to do (praxis).

The substantia nigra is a ganglia that is particularly responsible for the interpretation and coordination of the overall sensory information coming from the muscle spindles and the tendon organs. The totality of this information is crucial to assessing and controlling the changes in lengths of the body’s muscles, the speed with which a movement is occurring, and the actual work-load that is being handled. This, remember, is sensory information that we do not “feel” in the normal sense, but when it is incomplete or scrambled, fine control of movement becomes seriously hampered. The step becomes unsteady, the reach inaccurate; motions become jerky; the limbs may tremble or even oscillate grossly in their attempt to find the correct lengths and speeds. These aberrations are among the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a syndrome which appears when the substantia nigra is damaged in any way. Thus the substantia nigra adds to the brain’s overall arousal the specific messages coming from all of the spindles and tendon organs: Which exact motor units are lengthening or shortening, how fast are these changes in length taking place, and how much force is being developed?

First of all, the tone of my muscle cells must hold my skeleton together so that it neither collapses in upon my organs nor dislocates at its joints. It is tone, just as much as it is connective tissues or bone, that is responsible for my basic structural shape and integrity. Secondly, my muscle tone must superimpose upon its own stability the steady, rhythmical expansion and contraction of respiration. Third, it must support my overall structure in one position or another—lying, sitting standing, and so on. Finally, it must be able to brace and release any part of the body in relation to the whole, and to do this with spontaneity and split-second timing, so that graceful, purposeful action may be added to my stability, my posture, and my rhythmic respiration. It is no wonder we find that such large portions of our nervous systems are so continually engaged in controlling the maintenance and adjustments of this tone. The entire system of spindle cells, with both their contractile parts and their anulospiral receptors, the Golgi tendon organs, the reflex arcs, much of the internuncial circuitry of the spinal column, and most of the oldest portion of our brains—including the reticular formation and the basal ganglia—all work together to orchestrate this complex phenomenon. We have, as it were, a brain within our brain and a muscle system within our muscle system to monitor the constantly shifting values of background tonus, to provide a stable yet flexible framework which we are free to use how we will. Nor is it a wonder that these elements and processes are normally controlled below my level of consciousness—if this were not the case, walking across the room to get a glass of water would require more diversified and minute attention than my conscious awareness could possibly muster. It is the old brain, along with the even more ancient spinal cord, that are given the bulk of this task, because they have had so many more generations in which to grapple with the problems and refine the solutions. Millions upon millions of trials and errors have resulted in genetically constant motor circuits and sensory feedback loops which handle the fundamental life-supporting jobs of muscle tone for me automatically. Firm structure, posture, respiratory rhythms, swallowing, elimination, grasping, withdrawing, tracking with the eyes—all these intact and fully functional activities and more are given to each of us as new-born infants, the legacy of the development of our ancestors.

So it is necessary that we have a means of monitoring the tension developed by muscular activity, and equally necessary that the threshold of response for the inhibitory function of that monitor be a variable threshold that can be readily adjusted to suit many purposes, from preventing tissue damage due to overload, to providing a smooth and delicate twist of the tuning knob of a sensitive shortwave receiver. And such a marvelously adaptable tension-feedback system we do have in our Golgi tendon organs, reflex arcs which connect the sensory events in a stretching tendon directly to the motor events which control that degree of stretch, neural feed-back loops whose degree of sensory and motor stimulation may be widely altered according to our intent, our conscious training, and our unconscious habits. This ingenious device does, however, contain a singular danger, a danger unfortunately inherent in the very features of the Golgi reflex which are the cleverest, and the most indispensable to its proper function. The degree of facilitation of the feed-back loop, which sets the threshold value for the “required tension,” is controlled by descending impulses from higher brain centers down into the loop’s internuncial network in the brain stem and the spinal cord. In this way, conscious judgements and the fruits of practice are translated into precise neuromuscular values. But judgement and practice are not the only factors that can be involved in this facilitating higher brain activity. Relative levels of overall arousal, our attitudes towards our past experience, the quality of our present mood, neurotic avoidances and compulsions of all kinds, emotional associations from all quarters—any of these things can color descending messages, and do in fact cause considerable alterations in the Golgi’s threshold values. It is possible, for instance, to be so emotionally involved in an effort—either through panic or through exhilaration—that we do not even notice that our exertions have torn us internally until the excitement has receded, leaving the painful injury behind to surprise us. Or acute anxiety may drive the value of the “required tension” so high that our knuckles whiten as we grip the steering wheel, the pencil suddenly snaps in our fingers, or the glass shatters as we set it with too much force onto the table. On the other hand, timidity or the fear of being rejected can so sap us of “required tension” that it is difficult for us to produce a loud, clear knock upon a door that we tremble to enter.

It is really just as accurate to say that it has been the increasingly numerous and complex sensations associated with locomotion that has led to the development of the brain, as it is to state the case the other way around. As with all matter, usage dictates shape, specific function produces specific form. Thus as the animal kingdom has moved forward from jellyfish to worms to vertebrates, new behavior patterns have bodied forth new neural structures and circuits, just as surely as new neural mechanisms have opened up new modes of behavior. Once such a pattern has been established, the increasing sensory experience which arises from the assumption of a terrestrial existence is associated with further increases in the size and complexity of the brain, so that more complex behavior patterns are possible. Thus in man the assumption of the erect posture and the freeing of the upper limb from its supporting functions, with the consequent development of the hand as a potent new sensory organ, may well have played a significant part in the growth of the human nervous system to its present complexity.9 And note well: In this development, it has been the kind and the amount of sensory input which have been major factors in these profound changes in the structure and function of the central and peripheral nervous systems. Deep neuromuscular patterns most certainly are, and always have been, wide open to the influences of specific qualities and quantities of touch. In this context, it does not seem at all impossible that effective bodywork could foster new levels of awareness, new patterns of response, and even new neural conditions that would influence all future responses in an individual. The entire developmental history of the centralization and encephalization of the human nervous system is evidence of the potent organizing powers of touch.

The cerebral cortex is the newest portion of the nervous system, and in man it has developed into the largest portion. In its anatomical connections, it is clearly an outgrowth of the areas of the brain directly beneath it—the hypothalamus—and in its functional aspects it represents a great leap forward for the lower brain’s abilities to integrate sensory information and to select and order new motor responses. It is an immense addition to the internuncial net; fully three-quarters of the cell bodies in the human central nervous system are contained in the cortex. And the horizontal interconnections between these cells are far more dense than those in the cord or the lower brain. Schematically, it resembles a ball of cotton fuzz much more than it resembles even the most complex man-made electrical circuitry. The cortex appears to be primarily a vast storage center of information and associations, preserved bits of experience which can be suppressed or recalled to modify behavior in truly innumerable ways.

The lowest level of this modifying intermediate network is the spinal cord. The cord still possesses many features that were first developed in the segmented earthworm. It is largely made up of neurons completely contained within it, which form bridges between the sensory and motor elements throughout the whole body. Each peripheral nerve trunk still innervates a specific segment of the body, and still joins the cord at a specific level, creating a ganglion. Sensory signals entering into a single segment may be processed by its own ganglion, and cause localized motor response within the segment; or the signals may pass to adjacent segments, or be carried even further up or down the line, involving more ganglia in a more widely distributed response. In this way, the cord can monitor a large number of sensorimotor reactions without having to send signals all the way up to the brain. Thus stereotyped responses can be made without our having to “think” about them on a conscious level. Most of these localized and segmentally patterned responses are not the result of experience or training, but of genetically consistent wiring patterns in the internuncial network of the cord itself. These basic wiring patterns unfold in the foetus during the “mapping” process of the nervous system, and they have been pre-established by millions of years of development and usage. The spinal cord can be surgically sectioned from the higher regions of the internuncial net, and the experimental animal kept alive, so that we can isolate the range of responses that are primarily controlled by these cord reflexes. Almost all segmentally localized responses can be elicited, such as the knee jerk caused by tapping the tendon below the knee cap, or the elbow jerk caused by tapping the bicep tendon. These simple responses can also be spread into other segments, so that a painful prick on a limb causes the whole body to jerk away in a general withdrawal reflex. The bladder and rectum can be evacuated. A skin irritation elicits scratching, and the disturbance can be accurately located with a paw. Some of the basic postural and locomotive reflex patterns seem to reside in the wiring of the cord as well. If an animal with only its cord intact is assisted in getting up, it can remain standing on its own. The sensory signals from the pressure on the bottoms of the feet are evidently enough to trigger postural contractions throughout the body and hold the animal in the stance typical of its species. And if the animal is suspended with its legs dangling down, they will spontaneously initiate walking or running movements, indicating that the fundamental sequential arrangements of the basic reflexes necessary for walking are in the cord also. All of these localized and intersegmental responses are rapid and automatic, follow specific routes through the spinal circuitry, and elicit stereotyped patterns of muscular response. Most of them appear to consistently use the same neurons, synapses, and motor units every time they are initiated.

The lower brain—including the pons and the brain stem—is primarily responsible for our “subconscious” processes, those many activities which are more complex and integrated than cord reflexes, but of which we are seldom aware. To begin with, many more sequences of simple reflexes are possible if the pons and the stem are left intact with the cord. The lower brain clearly assists the cord in fine-tuning responses, and in arranging them in the appropriate order so that they produce more integrated behavior. The complicated sequences of muscular contraction necessary for sucking and swallowing, for example, are monitored at this level. These are skills with which a human infant is born; their underlying circuits—and even more importantly, the correct sequence of operation of these circuits—is a product of early genetic development, not individual experience and learning. In general, the lower brain seems to share many of the “hard-wired” features of the spinal cord. Axons and synapses form organizational units that appear to be consistent for all individuals of the same species, and their activation produces identical, stereotyped contractions and motions. But the additional complexities of the lower brain appear to enable it to pick and choose more freely among various possible circuits, and to arrange the stereotyped responses with a lot more flexibility than is possible with the cord alone. For instance, it is in the lower brain that information from the semi-circular canals in the inner ear—the sensory organ for gravitational perceptions and balance—is coordinated with the cord’s postural reflexes. A stiff stance can be elicited from these postural reflexes by merely putting pressure on the bottoms of the feet; by adding information concerning gravity and balance to this stance, the same reflex cord circuits may be continually adjusted to compensate for shifts in equilibrium as we tilt the floor upon which the animal is standing, or as we push him this way or that. A rigid fixed posture is made more flexible and at the same time more stable, because compensating adjustments among the simple postural reflexes is now possible. The lower brain coordinates the movements of the eyes, so that they track together. It directs digestive and metabolic processes and glandular secretions, and determines the patterns of circulation by controlling arterial blood pressure. And not only does it give new coordination to separate parts, it influences the system as a whole in ways that cannot be done by the segmental arrangement of the cord.

To give your baby the best chance of developing optimally, use loving touch as a means of bonding and early sensory stimulation

Sensory overload can easily overwhelm and distress young babies.

Even once the Culture as an entity had been established and the use of conventional currency had come to be seen as an archaic hindrance to development rather than its moderating enabler, appreciable amounts of energy and time - both biological and machine - had been spent perfecting the various methods by which the human sensory apparatus could be convinced that it was experiencing something that was not really happening.

First, we developed the self-model, because we had to integrate our sensory perceptions with our bodily behavior. Then this self-model became conscious, and the phenomenal self-model was born into the Ego Tunnel, allowing us to achieve global control of our bodies in a much more selective and flexible manner. This was the step from being an embodied natural system that has and uses an internal image of itself as a whole to a system that, in addition, consciously experiences this fact.

One day, however, they had an experience that revealed just how fragile their life had become. Bella developed a cold, causing fluid to accumulate in her ears. An eardrum ruptured. And with that she became totally deaf. That was all it took to sever the thread between them. With her blindness and memory problems, the hearing loss made it impossible for Felix to achieve any kind of communication with her. He tried drawing out letters on the palm of her hand but she couldn’t make them out. Even the simplest matters—getting her dressed, for instance—became a nightmare of confusion for her. Without sensory grounding, she lost track of time of day. She grew severely confused, at times delusional and agitated. He couldn’t take care of her. He became exhausted from stress and lack of sleep. He didn’t know what to do, but there was a system for such situations. The people at the residence proposed transferring her to a skilled nursing unit—a nursing home floor. He couldn’t bear the thought of it. No, he said. She needed to stay at home with him. Before the issue was forced, they got a reprieve. Two and a half weeks into the ordeal, Bella’s right eardrum mended and, although the hearing in her left ear was lost permanently, the hearing in her right ear came back. “Our communication is more difficult,” Felix said. “But at least it is possible.

the FDA’s own Web site states that “dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of children and developing fetuses. When amalgam fillings are placed in teeth or removed from teeth, they release mercury vapor. Mercury vapor is also released during chewing.

Barbelo was proud of her achievements and she knew the mind extraction sensory tool she had developed especially for the Mindplant program was unique in form; it actually sensed and locked onto the interior of a clients brain, extracted it and then inserted their consciousness into the body of the profile they'd selected within the simulated Mindplant world, she'd built with Visual's assistance and it had taken them a few years to achieve the required results.

There is a very important lesson for human evolution hidden in figures 9.3 and 12.1. At the cortical level, the three levels of processing are special to the human. Rolls has discussed the evidence that rodents do not have these successive levels; in fact, they have only a tiny area equivalent to the OFC for Level 2 processing. Experiments have reported that in the rodent, sensory identification and reward evaluation are combined and occur even before reaching the cortex. This means that the cortical processing of independent streams of sensory input at successive levels of behavioral analysis is a primate, and perhaps most highly developed human, invention. It is of adaptive value in enabling humans to carry out a more detailed analysis of food and drink flavors. Humans thereby are able to differentiate themselves to a greater degree in terms of flavor preferences. It supports the proposal in Neurogastronomy that humans are more adapted for flavor perception than are other species. It also supports our hypothesis that wine tasting takes advantage of this ability, developed for survival in selecting foods, and uses it to discriminate and enjoy the flavors of wine.

Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a *truth in itself* in which the reason underlying all appearances is to be found. The tacit thesis of perception is that at every instant experience can be co-ordinated with that of the previous instant and that of the following, and my perspective with that of other consciousnesses—that all contradictions can be removed, that monadic and intersubjective experience is one unbroken text—that what is now indeterminate for me could become determinate for a more complete knowledge, which is as it were realized in advance in the thing, or rather which is the thing itself. Science has first been merely the sequel or amplification of the process which constitutes perceived things. Just as the thing is the invariant of all sensory fields and of all individual perceptual fields, so the scientific concept is the means of fixing and objectifying phenomena. Science defined a theoretical state of bodies not subject to the action of any force, and *ipso facto* defined force, reconstituting with the aid of these ideal components the processes actually observed. It established statistically the chemical properties of pure bodies, deducing from these those of empirical bodies, and seeming thus to hold the plan of creation or in any case to have found a reason immanent in the world. The notion of geometrical space, indifferent to its contents, that of pure movement which does not by itself affect the properties of the object, provided phenomena with a setting of inert existence in which each event could be related to physical conditions responsible for the changes occurring, and therefore contributed to this freezing of being which appeared to be the task of physics. In thus developing the concept of the thing, scientific knowledge was not aware that it was working on a presupposition. Precisely because perception, in its vital implications and prior to any theoretical thought, is presented as perception of a being, it was not considered necessary for reflection to undertake a genealogy of being, and it was therefore confined to seeking the conditions which make being possible. Even if one took account of the transformations of determinant consciousness, even if it were conceded that the constitution of the object is never completed, there was nothing to add to what science said of it; the natural object remained an ideal unity for us and, in the famous words of Lachelier, a network of general properties. It was no use denying any ontological value to the principles of science and leaving them with only a methodical value, for this reservation made no essential change as far as philosophy was concerned, since the sole conceivable being remained defined by scientific method. The living body, under these circumstances, could not escape the determinations which alone made the object into an object and without which it would have had no place in the system of experience. The value predicates which the reflecting judgment confers upon it had to be sustained, in being, by a foundation of physico-chemical properties. In ordinary experience we find a fittingness and a meaningful relationship between the gesture, the smile and the tone of a speaker. But this reciprocal relationship of expression which presents the human body as the outward manifestation of a certain manner of being-in-the-world, had, for mechanistic physiology, to be resolved into a series of causal relations.” —from_Phenomenology of Perception_. Translated by Colin Smith, pp. 62-64 —Artwork by Cristian Boian

Develop a mind that is like the four great elements (earth, water, fire and air) because if you do this, pleasant or unpleasant sensory impressions that have arisen and taken hold of the mind will not persist. Develop love, Rahula, for by doing so you will get rid of ill-will. Develop compassion, for by doing so you will get rid of violence. Develop sympathetic joy, for by doing so you will get rid of animosity. Develop equanimity, for by doing so you will get rid of uncontrolled reaction. Develop the perception of the foul, for by doing so you will get rid of attachment. Develop the perception of impermanence, for by doing so you will get rid of the conceit of selfhood. Develop mindfulness of breathing for it is of great benefit and advantage.

Freelancing and Creativity In Freelancing, doing a job in different ways is called creativity. The importance of creativity is immense among all that is required for freelancing work because creativity is the main thing of freelancing. It is difficult to give an exact definition of creativity. Because there is no end to creativity. In the case of some, creativity or the development of creativity begins to manifest naturally, while for some it manifests through talent, practice, and practice. Creativity is basically a mental process that is the result of positive thinking, perseverance, and high analytical ability. Just as it takes practice, practice, and dedication to develop this creativity, there is a high chance that this creativity will be wasted if it is not properly used or applied. Below are the causes of creativity loss and ways to increase Creativity: ** Reasons for loss of Creativity - 1. Lack of focus on work – Creativity does not arise if there is no focus on work, to complete a task properly, there must be focus on it. 2. Irregular sleep – the brain does not work properly if you do not sleep properly, repeated sleep disturbances can also cause many mental problems that hinder creativity. 3. Suffering from indecisiveness – Having too many negative thoughts running through your head while doing a task can also hamper creativity. For example: if the work is going well, if the client likes it, if the client doesn't like it, if the client doesn't pay, etc. 4. Fear of not succeeding at work – Many people rush to work for quick cash income, but it does not work properly or on the contrary, more creativity is lost, which results in payment time problems. As a result, the fear of not succeeding enters the freelancer. ** Ways to Increase Creativity - 1. Dietary discipline – Of course, there is no substitute for healthy eating. Consuming regular meals maintains mental and physical well-being which in turn enhances creativity. 2. Gaining knowledge from nature – Nature is the main source of knowledge. All the sages and poets in the world were worshipers of nature. All of them could see something extraordinary in the ordinary things of this nature. Try to see it that way. 3. From everyday events – notice what is happening around you. You can get new ideas from it, for example, you can get an idea on any subject by reading a book, and new ideas can be invented while watching TV or watching newspaper advertisements. 4. Write down ideas – We all have something going on in our heads all the time, either mainly through thought or sensory processing. So whenever you get an idea, note it down so that you don't forget to read it. So, creativity is created by the combination of ideas and skills. Freelancing is unthinkable without this creativity because to do freelancing you must have a clear idea about something or acquire full skill in that subject.

This sessile lifestyle means any given tree must find everything it needs, and must defend itself, while remaining fixed in place. It follows that a highly developed sensory repertoire is required to locate food and identify threats. And so, a tree smells and tastes—they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies. A tree sees—they react differently to various wavelengths of light as well as to shadow. A tree touches—a vine or a root knows when it encounters a solid object. And trees hear; the sound of a caterpillar chomping a leaf primes the tree’s genetic machinery to produce defence chemicals. Tree roots seek out the water flowing through buried pipes, which suggests that plants somehow hear the sound of flowing water.

The rattlesnake represents the very acme of serpentine sophistication. It has superlative sensing organs that exploit infra-red and chemo-sensory stimuli to enable it to locate its prey. It is armed with one of the most powerful of all venoms with which it can inject its victims with surgical precision. It is long-lived and produces its young fully formed and immediately capable of fending for themselves. But it has one vulnerability, one way in which human beings who see rattlesnakes as a threat to their own dominance are able to attack it. In North America, in the northern part of the rattlesnake’s range, winters can be so severe that a cold-blooded snake cannot remain active. So many species that are common elsewhere in North America do not spread far north. Rattlers are among the few that do. They survive the winter by another special adaptation. They have developed the ability to hibernate. On the prairies of the mid-West and north into Canada, they choose to do so in the burrows of prairie dogs, rodents related to marmots. Elsewhere in the woodlands, they find outcrops of rocks that are riven by deep clefts. But such places are not abundant. As autumn approaches and temperatures fall, great numbers of rattlesnakes set out on long cross-country journeys of many miles following traditional routes to the places where they and their parents before them hibernate each year. Some of these wintering dens may contain a thousand individuals. So those human beings who hate snakes and who, in spite of the rattler’s sophisticated early warning system, believe that they are a constant and lethal threat, are also able, at this season of the year, to massacre rattlesnakes in thousands. As a consequence one of the most advanced and wonderfully sophisticated of all snakes — perhaps of all reptiles — is now, in many parts of the territories it once ruled, in real danger of extinction.

hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time.24 May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them.25 Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance—aroused in people by signs of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified, is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant.26 The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy.

MacIver notes that octopuses, while underwater creatures, seem to maximize the extent of their sensory capacities. They have very large eyes, and tend to remain still while executing complex tasks. It’s dangerous being an octopus; from the point of view of a predatory sea-dweller, you are a vulnerable bag of delicious nutrients. To survive, they have had to develop innovative defensive strategies, camouflaging themselves by changing skin color and emitting clouds of ink when forced to flee. Intelligence is a part of that defensive arsenal; an octopus will hide among rocks and coral when it sleeps, often arranging pieces so as to better shield itself from view. Perhaps the evolutionary pressure that led to large octopus brains was of a completely different type from that which led to land-dwelling animals.

Mind sculpture, developed by Ian Robertson, is a newer technique that involves total but still-imaginary sensory immersion. It requires its practitioners to pretend that they are actually engaged in the action, not just seeing but hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. In mind sculpture, people imagine the movement of their muscles, and the rise and fall of their emotions.

I first met this young client when he was eight years old. He was very shy with a calm disposition. He had been diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder and his parents had hired a special tutor. His mother and father were already clients of mine, and his mother was very conscientious with his diet. She was most concerned about his extreme fatigue, how difficult it was to get him up in the morning, and how difficult it was for him to fall asleep. He was also falling asleep at school. In addition, she was concerned he was having difficulty remembering his schoolwork. With sensory processing disorder, children may have difficulty concentrating, planning and organizing, and responding appropriately to external stimuli. It is considered to be a learning disorder that fits into the autism spectrum of disorders. To target his diet and nutritional supplementation, I recommended a comprehensive blood panel, an adrenal profile, a food sensitivity panel, and an organic acids profile to determine vitamin, mineral, and energy deficiency status. His blood panel indicated low thyroid function, iron deficiency, and autoimmune thyroid. His adrenal profile indicated adrenal fatigue. His organic acids test indicated low B vitamins and zinc, low detoxification capacity, and low levels of energy nutrients, particularly magnesium. He was also low in omega-3 fatty acids and sensitive to gluten, dairy, eggs, and corn. Armed with all of that information, he and I worked together to develop a diet based on his test results. I like to involve children in the designing of their diet. That way they get to include the foods they like, learn how to make healthy substitutions for foods they love but can no longer eat, and learn how to improve their overall food choices. He also learned he needed to include protein at all meals, have snacks throughout the day, and what constitutes a healthy snack. I recommended he start with a gut restoration protocol along with iron support; food sensitivities often go hand in hand with leaky gut issues. This would also impact brain function. In the second phase of his program, I added inositol and serotonin support for sleep, thyroid support, DHA, glutathione support (to help regulate autoimmunity), a vitamin and mineral complex, fish oils, B-12, licorice extract for his adrenals, and dopamine and acetylcholine support to improve his concentration, energy, and memory. Within a month, his parents reported that he was falling asleep easily and would wake up with energy in the morning. His concentration improved, as did his ability to remember what he had learned at school. He started to play sports in the afternoon and took the initiative to let his mom know what foods not to include in his diet. He is still on his program three years later, and the improvements

Both methods develop increased awareness that can lead to neural changes and neurodifferentiation. (Put differently, when Feldenkrais trained his pupils to refine their sensory awareness of how it felt to perform a movement, he was training them to make more use of the feedback provided by their senses.) Some introductory books on

counselors, often confuses stages, states, and lines. He mentioned that clients could move through all four stages (sensorimotor to formal operations) in a single counseling session. People do not actually develop through four (or even two) stages in a day. Rather, different lines of development may be differentially developed, so that a client may appear to exhibit very rudimentary development in one aspect (for example, morality) and advanced development in another (scientific or mathematical thinking). Similar phenomena (clients’ appearing to exhibit the qualities of different stages of development) can be accounted for by distinguishing between stages and states of consciousness. For example, a client may have a developmental center of gravity that hovers around the formal-reflexive mind but experience a state of panic or intense depression during which he resorts to the type of illogical and contrary-to-evidence thinking that characterize preoperational thinking. There are a few places where Ivey seems to distinguish between stages and states, as when he is describing a concrete operational client with whom the counselor finds various deletions, distortions, overgeneralizations, and other errors of thinking or behaving that “represent preoperational states” (1986, p. 163, italics added). This is an important point. The basic structures are not completely stable; otherwise, they would endure even under extreme stress. Hence, developmental waves are conceived of as relatively stable and enduring—far more stable and enduring than states of consciousness, but also far from rigidly permanent structures. Levels and Lines of Development Ivey also wrote of how clients cycle through Piaget’s stages of cognitive development: Each person who continues on to higher levels of development is also, paradoxically, forced to return to basic sensori-motor and pre-operational experience… . the skilled individual who decides to learn a foreign language … must enter language training at the lowest level and work through sensori-motor, preoperational, and concrete experience before being able to engage in formal operations with the new language. (Ivey, 1986, p. 161) People do not revert from the capacity for formal operational thinking to sensorimotor, except perhaps because of a brain injury or organic disorders of the nervous system. Piaget was very emphatic that cognitive development occurs in invariant stages, meaning that everyone progresses through the stages in the same order. At the same time, it is true that just because an individual exhibits formal operational thinking (a stage or level of cognitive development) in chemistry and mathematics does not mean that she automatically can perform at mastery levels in any domain, such as, in this case, a foreign language. This is another example of the utility of Wilber’s (2000e) distinguishing the sundry lines

If times or ages are mentioned in any activity, please take that as a guideline only. Children will learn the activity as it comes naturally to them. A thirty minute activity may take your child forty minutes. If the suggested age is four, but you have a three year old that can grasp the concepts do not let the recommendations hinder you. This information has not been provided for all activities. This is for a couple of reasons. One being that some of these activities span broader age ranges. The other is that while I find that sometimes it is useful to have an idea of where to start your child, it is better to look at your child in terms of ability and readiness rather than number of years. If times are included, they are meant for assistance in planning your day only. They are not in any way intended to be a marker for your child’s success. The activities have been divided up into the instructional areas of language, mathematics, sensory development and practical life skills. Many of these activities can serve as crossovers, allowing you to introduce multiple concepts at once. Some subjects such as cultural studies or science are included in practical life skills, since at this age that is primarily what those subjects encompass. Where applicable, additional skill areas have been included

1. Give your toddler some large tubular pasta and a shoelace.  Show her how to thread the shoelace through the pasta. 2. Take an empty long wrapping paper tube and place one end on the edge of the sofa and the other end on the floor.  Give him a small ball such as a Ping Pong ball to roll down the tube.   3. Give her some individually wrapped toilet tissues, some boxes of facial tissue or some small tins of food such as tomato paste.  Then let her have fun stacking them.     4. Wrap a small toy and discuss what might be inside it.  Give it to him to unwrap. Then rewrap as he watches.  Have him unwrap it again.    5. Cut  such fruits as strawberries and bananas into chunks.  Show her how to slide the chunks onto a long plastic straw.  Then show her how you can take off one chunk at a time, dip it into some yogurt and eat it.   6. Place a paper towel over a water-filled glass.  Wrap a rubber band around the top of the glass to hold the towel in place.  Then place a penny on top of the paper towel in the centre of the glass.  Give your child a pencil to poke holes in the towel until the penny sinks to the bottom of the glass.   7. You will need a small sheet of coarse sandpaper and various lengths of chunky wool.  Show him how to place these lengths of wool on the sandpaper and how the strands stick to it.   8. Use a large photo or picture and laminate it or put it between the sheets of clear contact paper.  Cut it into several pieces to create a puzzle.   9. Give her two glasses, one empty and one filled with water.  Then show her how to use a large eyedropper in order to transfer some of the water into the empty glass.   10. Tie the ends/corners of several scarves together.  Stuff the scarf inside an empty baby wipes container and pull a small portion up through the lid and then close the lid.  Let your toddler enjoy pulling the scarf out of the container.   11. Give your child some magnets to put on a cookie sheet.  As your child puts the magnets on the cookie sheet and takes them off, talk about the magnets’ colours, sizes, etc.   12. Use two matching sets of stickers. Put a few in a line on a page and see if he can match the pattern.  Initially, you may need to lift an edge of the sticker off the page since that can be difficult to do.    13. You will need a piece of thin Styrofoam or craft foam and a few cookie cutters.  Cut out shapes in the Styrofoam with the cookie cutters and yet still keep the frame of the styrofoam intact.  See if your child can place the cookie cutters back into their appropriate holes.        14. Give her a collection of pompoms that vary in colour and size and see if she can sort them by colour or size into several small dishes. For younger toddlers, put a sample pompom colour in each dish.   15. Gather a selection of primary colour paint chips or cut squares of card stock or construction paper.  Make sure you have several of the same colour.  Choose primary colours.  See if he can match the colours.  Initially, he may be just content to play with the colored chips stacking them or making patterns with them.

The mind extraction sensory tool Barbelo had developed for the Mindplant program was unique it actually sensed and locked onto the interior of a clients brain, extracted and then inserted their consciousness into the body of the profile they'd selected within the simulated Mindplant world she'd built with Visual's assistance.

4. In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue. Humility is having an accurate assessment of your own nature and your own place in the cosmos. Humility is awareness that you are an underdog in the struggle against your own weakness. Humility is an awareness that your individual talents alone are inadequate to the tasks that have been assigned to you. Humility reminds you that you are not the center of the universe, but you serve a larger order. 5. Pride is the central vice. Pride is a problem in the sensory apparatus. Pride blinds us to the reality of our divided nature. Pride blinds us to our own weaknesses and misleads us into thinking we are better than we are. Pride makes us more certain and closed-minded than we should be. Pride makes it hard for us to be vulnerable before those whose love we need. Pride makes coldheartedness and cruelty possible. Because of pride we try to prove we are better than those around us. Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives. 6. Once the necessities for survival are satisfied, the struggle against sin and for virtue is the central drama of life. No external conflict is as consequential or as dramatic as the inner campaign against our own deficiencies. This struggle against, say, selfishness or prejudice or insecurity gives meaning and shape to life. It is more important than the external journey up the ladder of success. This struggle against sin is the great challenge, so that life is not futile or absurd. It is possible to fight this battle well or badly, humorlessly or with cheerful spirit. Contending with weakness often means choosing what parts of yourself to develop and what parts not to develop. The purpose of the struggle against sin and weakness is not to “win,” because that is not possible; it is to get better at waging it. It doesn’t matter if you work at a hedge fund or a charity serving the poor. There are heroes and schmucks in both worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in this struggle.

(see figure 1) or the macro-steps of the day’s plans (see figure 4). The level of detail depends on the context and the child’s needs for communication support. To help encourage literacy and develop sight words at

emotions develop out of an undifferentiated affective state of excitement in which sensory activities are combined (as in synaesthesia).

Neuroplasticity simply put is the brain’s ability to recreate new synapses and neural pathways that allow for growth and development. In children, the brain is incredibly pliable

Infants (one month to twelve months)—Infants benefit from having opportunities throughout the day to be active and outdoors. Physical activity encourages organization of the sensory system and important motor development. Toddlers (twelve months to three years)—Toddlers could benefit from at least five to eight hours worth of active play a day, preferably outdoors. They will naturally be active throughout the day. As long as you provide plenty of time for free play, they will seek out the movement experiences they need in order to develop. Preschoolers (three years to five years)—Preschoolers could also use five to eight hours of activity and play outdoors every day. Preschoolers learn about life, practice being an adult, and gain important sensory and movement experiences through active play. It’s a good idea to provide them plenty of time for this. School age (five years to thirteen years)—Young children up to preadolescence could benefit from at least four to five hours of physical activity and outdoor play daily. Children in elementary school need movement throughout the day in order to stay engaged and to learn in traditional school environments. They should have frequent breaks to move their body before, during, and after school hours. Adolescents (thirteen years to nineteen years)—Adolescents could benefit from physical activity three to four hours a day. Children in the teens still need to move in order to promote healthy brain and body development, regulate new emotions, and experience important social opportunities with friends out in nature.

And as we’ve mentioned, one of the most powerful tools we use to help regulate a distressed infant is rhythm. Oprah: Why is that? Dr. Perry: All life is rhythmic. The rhythms of the natural world are embedded in our biological systems. This begins in the womb, when the mother’s beating heart creates rhythmic sound, pressure, and vibrations that are sensed by the developing fetus and provide constant rhythmic input to the organizing brain. These experiences create powerful associations—essentially, memories—that connect rhythms of roughly sixty to eighty beats per minute (bpm) to regulation. Sixty to eighty bpm is the average resting heart rate for an adult; it’s the rhythm the fetus sensed, and it equates to being in balance, to being warm, full, quenched, safe. After birth, rhythms at these frequencies can comfort and soothe, whereas the loss of rhythm, or high, variable, and unpredictable patterns of sensory input, becomes associated with threat.

That in perception we do not merely add together given sensory elements, and that complex perceptions possess attributes which cannot be derived from the discernible attributes of the separate parts, is one of the conclusions most strongly emphasized by practically all recent developments in psychology.

To develop intuition and perception I KEEP AN OPEN MIND I do not dismiss what I cannot explain. Intuition and perception often guide me toward the unknown and the inexplicable

because I had been taught that that kind of change was impossible. The only explanations that fit my experience completely contradicted everything I had learned in optometry school. So I left my training behind to develop a new approach to natural vision improvement, one that was based on the fundamental self-healing properties of the body/mind. As I introduced this new approach to my patients, I noticed that it did a lot more than help people improve their eyesight. In fact, vision improvement was just a small part of the powerful transformations that began to occur. In the twenty years since then, I have seen over and over that changing your vision is the same as changing your life. Jonathan Swift said a long time ago that “vision is the art of seeing [the] invisible.” My clinical experience has proven that he was absolutely right—clearing our vision allows us to, literally, see the parts of ourselves, of our lives, that were invisible to us before. In the ancient traditions, the concept of “vision” did not refer to eyesight; it was synonymous with wisdom. Real wisdom, even what we call genius, flows naturally from the clarity of our perception. The belief that eyesight occurs only in our eyes limits more than our vision; it limits our entire worldview. The eyes have been described most accurately as the windows of the soul. Light energy enters our being through our eyes, but our vision of reality is determined more by what we see with our mind’s eye than what we see with our physical eye. In fact, I’ve found that our eyesight is simply a reflection of our view of reality. So when the mind begins to see more clearly, the eyes also begin to see more clearly—and that shift can be instantaneous. I now spend most of my time speaking and giving workshops all over the world, and everywhere I travel, I meet ordinary people who have miraculously healed their eyesight. They all suddenly saw a new possibility. Vision is so much more than eyesight. The eyes are simply one focal point in a vast perceptive field. But if we live in a chronic state of fear or anger, all our sensory functions contract; we literally become narrow-minded. After a while that contraction begins to feel “normal.” Most of us seem to have closed down some aspects of our perception.

To develop intuition and perception I TRUST MY FELLINGS When I have a hunch or feeling, I follow it. Over time, I have learned to differentiate between genuine intuition and the thoughts of my mind

To develop intuition and perception I PRACTICE EMPATHY Empathy allows me to connect with the emotions and energies of others. This enhances my perception and helps me to better understand people