The Sensory Processing Diet

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Your Child's Brain and Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD)

If you are reading this book, it is likely that your child has recently been diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). This is probably alarming and confusing. It may be the first time you've ever heard of this condition. What is it? How did my child get it? What can I do about it?

You may be unfamiliar with neurology lingo and have little use for highly technical explanations of SPD. However, in order to be of the best possible help to your child in navigating through the struggles ahead, it is very important that you gain a layman's understanding of what SPD is.

When I first heard about SPD, I was told that it was a disorder that interferes with how the brain communicates with the rest of the body. I wanted to understand this basic definition better, so I decided to learn as much as I could about the entire nervous system.

Arming yourself with the layman's version of the brain and nervous system gives you several advantages:

Once you understand how a properly functioning system is supposed to work, you'll be able to see your child in an entirely new light. Most people can handle almost anything if they are armed with the right information. When my daughter was first diagnosed, I talked to therapists, psychologists and other parents. I also took courses on the brain and child development. Learning about the brain and its various functions is essential because in doing so you will better understand SPD and what you're dealing with. You'll find answers to all of those 'what' questions. But learning about the brain and nervous system answers the 'why' questions, such as, "Why does this sensation bother her so much when another one doesn't?" or "Why can't she run, jump and stay balanced?" and "Why can she create gorgeous pictures, but not able to hold a pencil to write properly or coordinate her hands to use scissors?" Having that knowledge can be both comforting and empowering.

Knowing more about the brain and nervous system helps you step back and identify possible causes of the behaviors you're seeing in your child. Understanding what the triggers are enables you to help your child mange his behaviors more effectively.

SPD has often been termed as an 'invisible' disorder because you can't see it on a child's face or body and you can't give a child pills to make it go away. Absorbing as much information as we can empowers us to be strong advocates for our children, because we know that they don't simply have behavioral problems, but are actually struggling with something much deeper.

The more we understand about the disorder, and the systems and organs it affects, the better we can help educate others. After all, our children are learning how to function in the world around them and with the people in it. Shouldn't those same people understand how to interact with our children too? Unfortunately, caregivers and educators who don't know about SPD, or understand how it truly affects the body, may punish the child for her overt behavior instead of digging for the root of the reactions.

The Nervous System - Our Body's Messenger System

I was taught to think of the nervous system as a huge messaging corporation made up of the Head Office (the brain, pun intended), the central messaging track (spinal cord) and the micro-messaging routes (peripheral system). And, of course, there are the little bicycle messengers and messenger assistants (the neurons and neurotransmitters) that take the brain's messages everywhere they're supposed to go.

I will briefly go over these different areas in order to understand how the whole system works together, and then discuss how SPD interferes with the nervous system's ability to do its job effectively.

The Head Office: the Brain

Considering its size, only about 2.9 pounds (or 1.3 kilograms), it is amazing how many tiny structures there are inside the human brain and how all of those tiny structures work together taking in, processing and sending out information to help our bodies function most effectively. And because of this need for unity, dysfunction in one area of the brain can impact functioning in other areas, which can result in the body not getting clear messages about what it's supposed to be doing. A lot of SPD research focuses on the areas and structures in the brain relating to sensation, emotion, motivated behavior, movement, attention, sleep and maintenance of muscle tone.

The head office of our messaging corporation is divided into two departments (hemispheres), which communicate the 'goings-on' of the rest of the corporation through a thin, but strong, wall (corpus callosum). Now each of these main departments has its own special jobs and functions (lateralization), but they work as a team to get other members of the corporation to do their jobs efficiently and properly.

The head office divvies up jobs fairly by dividing the main departments into mini areas (lobes) that are each in charge of specific bodily functions:

Frontal deals with behavior, personality, control of movement and learning.

Parietal mostly helps out with proprioception (perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body) as well as processing tactile and visual information

Temporal takes on tasks having to do with coordinating hearing and speech and,

Occipital in the back of the brain, deals with vision and helping the brain to understand what the eyes are seeing.

Before messages get to the head office, the VP of Operations (brain stem) stops them and decides which area of the head office each message should go to for processing and suggests an appropriate course of action. The VP has assistants to read messages about balance, equilibrium and coordination (cerebellum) and helps determine the meaning of those messages (limbic system). From there, messages are then analyzed by the VP of Central Processing (cerebral cortex) before being sent back into the messaging system, since it has final say on the processing of sensory and motor information for the corporate body.

Once this procedure is complete, which actually takes mere seconds, the response is shipped out of the VP of Operations area to the messaging track (spinal cord) to reach its final destination.

Although this is an extremely simplified explanation, it really is all a parent needs to know at this point. The most important thing to remember is that the connection of these messages is very important because if they get mixed up, or stopped, at any other point, the receiver won't know what's going on.

According to Dr. A. Jean Ayres, who was a Masters-level occupational therapist, a Ph.D. in educational psychology and credited for discovering SPD, the areas in the brain specialized to one sense receive information and respond simultaneously to more than one sort of sensation at a time.

Here's an example of how sensory and motor senses work together. If you gave a baby a rattle, it could be a brightly colored or shiny silver one that feels cold/smooth/textured in some way and makes noise when shaken. The sensory systems involved with vision, tactile, hearing, fine motor skills (to grasp the rattle), and coordination will have to work together to give the child the information he or she needs to interact properly with the rattle. So, you see how things can be a little confusing, even for something as basic as playing with a toy, when messages aren't being processed properly.

The Spinal Cord: The Message Track

Essentially, the spinal cord's job is to carry sensory and motor input messages to the brain, as well as response messages from the brain to the rest of the body. Using our messaging system analogy, messages travel along the messaging track to the head office for processing, then the responses are brought back to their final destination in the corporate body for action.

There really isn't much sensory processing going on in the spinal cord, but it's important to understand what's happening in there because some of the exercises in later chapters involved stimulating and stretching out the spinal cord to help it do its job more effectively.

Neurons and Neurotransmitters: The Transporters and Bicycle Messengers

Neurons are defined as brain cells that send and receive messages using electrical impulses. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals that help the neurons communicate with one another. So going back to our messenger model, messages are taken from the messaging track (spinal cord) by the bicycle messengers (neurons), who transport the important messages to a small sorting area (synapse) that stop the message in order to decide what the next bicycle messenger should do with it. Once a decision is made, the messenger assistants send the message along on its journey. The message actually makes several stops like this along its way before it reaches its final destination. It is like a relay race in which one runner goes a certain distance, then passes the baton to the next runner waiting.

As long as the messenger assistants interpret the...