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Sensory Integration – By Chris Slaughter
This post is for anybody who picked up a jump rope and couldn’t do double unders for months and then one day all the sudden could. There is a cool concept called sensory neurological adaptation. The theory was described in 1968 by Jean Ayres who was an occupational therapist and education psychologist.
The skinny: when you have a stimulus; such as running, seeing different colors & shapes, feeling metal and wood, the senses act together and the brain compiles those inputs and “integrates” all of the senses signals into the knowledge which is already in your cranium. In the case of the physical which we are dealing mostly with in the gym; take a cartwheel for example, the brain is taking in and recording signals from hand pressure, velocity and balance from the eardrums, change in view from the eyeballs and force of the muscles. The brain then takes these inputs and either creates or adjusts it’s “output” to better suit the needs of that task. Thus adaptation occurs, and we get better at cartwheels.
Basically sensory integration is learning plain and simple. The cool part of this is most of that integration and adaptation happens when we sleep. When in the last half of our sleep cycle the brain starts to build new neurological pathways to help accommodate better the tasks which we attempted to do during the day. When we wake up, we are better. It’s pretty much that simple. So don’t worry, if you suck at something today, give it a couple of tries, then go sleep, and try again tomorrow. The more frequently you try, the faster your brain will figure it out. Oh and don’t forget to sleep.