By Bette Lamont
If you have been seeking solutions for your child and found yourself sifting through the wide array of various approaches to sensory, reflex, and other neurodevelopmental challenges, we would like to emphasize the interdependence of all systems. How the brain intakes information (sensory) and how the brain outputs information and stimulates itself (reflex and movement) are critical to consider as a whole. There must be coherence in the reflex, motor, mobility, and sensory systems for the whole brain to mature and flourish. We cannot extract one of these areas of concern from the coherent functions of the whole brain. Therefore, we cannot use just a sensory learning approach, a reflex approach, or a movement approach. All have to be balanced in any treatment program.
Here we want to explore one aspect of this concept by stating that no “sensation can occur without movement.” Unless we move, or unless something in our environment moves, there is no visual, auditory, tactile, or vestibular perception.
Vision, hearing, and the perception of texture, pressure and other sensory experiences are a product of movement.
The vibration of light impacts the retina and vision occurs. It is well known that often we do not notice, or may not even be able to see an object until it moves, such as a deer standing in a wood close to us, but completely still, or a flock of birds in a leafy tree.
The movement of waves through air causes sound. Where that movement is not allowed to happen, such as in a vacuum, no sound is made.
Touch happens because our contact with a surface changes. By movement we feel texture, through increasing pressure against skin and muscle we feel touch from light to intense.
Movement is the source of perception.
This simple statement is one you can test for yourself. Wherever you are reading this, turn 90 degrees to left or right. What has changed in your perceptions? Everything! As you turn, the colors, quality of light, shadow, and angle at which you perceive particular objects has changed your entire visual world. As you turn at 90 degrees, subtle changes may occur in your auditory world. Your distance from a wall, the texture of the objects in your environment, the angle at which a sound source is sitting in relation to your ears, will determine how sound waves will enter the ears and be interpreted by the brain. Echolocation is based on this fact.
As you turn, you feel air move against your skin, perhaps a different distribution of weight on your feet or your bottom, if you are sitting. Your clothes will shift slightly and tactile perception results.
Sit completely still with light or sound coming from a single source such as a television or computer and the infinite, complex variations possible in your sensory world have been diminished greatly.
Without movement, sensation is diminished. Without movement, sensory learning cannot effectively happen.
We must take into account all brain functions simultaneously in order to support brain maturation. This is the role of NeuroDevelopmental Movement® as it replicates the Developmental Sequence to unite all systems in nature’s best model of holistic healing.