Skip to main content

Home/ Autism Teachers/ Group items tagged sensory processing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Tero Toivanen

Sensory Friendly Classrooms with Dr. Roya Ostovar - The SPD Blogger Network - 3 views

www.spdbloggernetwork.com/...lassrooms-with-dr-roya-ostovar

classrooms sensory friendly accommodations school SPD special education special needs SPED classroom autism

shared by Tero Toivanen on 01 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Having sensory friendly settings is common sense and it benefits everyone, all students and learners as well as teachers and staff. Changing the classroom also teaches all students how to find practical and adaptive ways of making their setting work for them to allow for optimal learning and functioning, a skill that is beneficial to everyone. It also makes more sense to change the environment to fit the child’s needs and not the other way around. Changing the classroom helps the child with SPD blend in with other students, and it is not isolating, or stigmatizing.
  • A sensory friendly classroom improves attention, concentration, ability to focus for longer periods of time, learning, social functioning, and it also reduces the overall level of stress
  • For more specific and multiple examples of the accommodations that can be made, a book I authored titled “The Ultimate Guide to Sensory Processing Disorder” offers a comprehensive guide.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Vision: Reduce/ eliminate clutter and visual distractions; modify assignments to be shorter; use a highlighter
  • Auditory: Reduce/eliminate distracting noise; play Mozart or calming music in the background when possible
  • Tactile: Allow students to use chalk on the board because it is more tactile rich
  • Olfactory: Use scented markers to wake kids up; have lavender lotion or soap; and avoid noxious odors in the classroom
  • Vestibular: Allow movement and breaks; offer therapy balls to sit on; Movin-Sit cushions benefit the whole classroom; stretch breaks, start class with movement activities
  • Properioception: Movement, Movin-Sit cushions, Brain Gym, Yoga, Chair push ups (i.e. sitting on hands and pushing up); chairs and tables at right height and positioned correctly
  • A sensory friendly classroom gets the kids with SPD and ASD ready to learn; improves the overall functioning of the child including learning, attention, concentration, social functioning, and behavioral presentation; and lowers their stress and anxiety levels
  • Two quick suggestions: 1) Simplify the classroom: Less is more. Take a minimalistic approach to setting up the room and; 2) Support all learning styles: Some kids learn through auditory channels, some visual, and some through kinesthetic and hands on activities. By the same token, incorporate activities that support the sensory channel and each child’s sensory profile
Tero Toivanen

Sensory processing in autism - 0 views

aut.sagepub.com/...215

autism sensory processing Sensory Profile

shared by Tero Toivanen on 24 May 09 - Cached
  • Tero Toivanen on 24 May 09
     
    Furthermore, analysis of the patterns of sensory processing impairments revealed striking within-group variability in the ASD group, suggesting that individuals with ASD could experience very different, yet similarly severe, sensory processing abnormalities. These results suggest that unusual sensory processing in ASD extends across the lifespan and have implications regarding both the treatment and the diagnosis of ASD in adulthood.
Tero Toivanen

New Theory Of Autism Suggests Symptoms Or Disorder May Be Reversible - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...090401145312.htm

autism new theory brain

shared by Tero Toivanen on 02 Apr 09 - Cached
  • the brains of people with autism are structurally normal but dysregulated, meaning symptoms of the disorder might be reversible.
  • autism is a developmental disorder caused by impaired regulation of the locus coeruleus, a bundle of neurons in the brain stem that processes sensory signals from all areas of the body.
  • The new theory stems from decades of anecdotal observations that some autistic children seem to improve when they have a fever, only to regress when the fever ebbs.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • This study documented that autistic children experience behavior changes during fever.
  • Einstein researchers contend that scientific evidence directly points to the locus coeruleus–noradrenergic (LC-NA) system as being involved in autism. "The LC-NA system is the only brain system involved both in producing fever and controlling behavior," says co-author Dominick P. Purpura, M.D., dean emeritus and distinguished professor of neuroscience at Einstein.
  • The locus coeruleus has widespread connections to brain regions that process sensory information. It secretes most of the brain's noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in arousal mechanisms, such as the "fight or flight" response. It is also involved in a variety of complex behaviors, such as attentional focusing (the ability to concentrate attention on environmental cues relevant to the task in hand, or to switch attention from one task to another). Poor attentional focusing is a defining characteristic of autism.
  • "What is unique about the locus coeruleus is that it activates almost all higher-order brain centers that are involved in complex cognitive tasks," says Dr. Mehler.
  • autism, the LC-NA system is dysregulated by the interplay of environment, genetic, and epigenetic factors
  • They believe that stress plays a central role in dysregulation of the LC-NA system, especially in the latter stages of prenatal development when the fetal brain is particularly vulnerable.
  • a higher incidence of autism among children whose mothers had been exposed to hurricanes and tropical storms during pregnancy.
  • autistic children, fever stimulates the LC-NA system, temporarily restoring its normal regulatory function. "This could not happen if autism was caused by a lesion or some structural abnormality of the brain," says Dr. Purpura.
  • future of autism treatment probably lies in drugs that selectively target certain types of noradrenergic brain receptors or, more likely, in epigenetic therapies targeting genes of the LC-NA system.
  • If the locus coeruleus is impaired in autism, it is probably because tens or hundreds, maybe even thousands, of genes are dysregulated in subtle and complex ways," says Dr. Mehler. "The only way you can reverse this process is with epigenetic therapies, which, we are beginning to learn, have the ability to coordinate very large integrated gene networks."
  • "You can't take a complex neuropsychiatric disease that has escaped our understanding for 50 years and in one fell swoop have a therapy that is going to reverse it — that's folly. On the other hand, we now have clues to the neurobiology, the genetics, and the epigenetics of autism. To move forward, we need to invest more money in basic science to look at the genome and the epigenome in a more focused way."
  • Tero Toivanen on 02 Apr 09
     
    the brains of people with autism are structurally normal but dysregulated, meaning symptoms of the disorder might be reversible.
Tero Toivanen

Autism disorders might be reversible. | - I Teach Autism.com - - 0 views

www.iteachautism.com/...-or-disorder-may-be-reversible

autism fever epigenetics locus coeruleus brain neurobiology LC-NA system theory Albert Einstein College

shared by Tero Toivanen on 08 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have proposed a sweeping new theory of autism that suggests that the brains of people with autism are structurally normal but dysregulated, meaning symptoms of the disorder might be reversible.
  • The central tenet of the theory, published in the March issue of Brain Research Reviews, is that autism is a developmental disorder caused by impaired regulation of the locus coeruleus, a bundle of neurons in the brain stem that processes sensory signals from all areas of the body.
  • The new theory stems from decades of anecdotal observations that some autistic children seem to improve when they have a fever, only to regress when the fever ebbs.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Einstein researchers contend that scientific evidence directly points to the locus coeruleus–noradrenergic (LC-NA) system as being involved in autism. “The LC-NA system is the only brain system involved both in producing fever and controlling behavior,” says co-author Dominick P. Purpura, M.D., dean emeritus and distinguished professor of neuroscience at Einstein.
  • The locus coeruleus has widespread connections to brain regions that process sensory information.
  • It is also involved in a variety of complex behaviors, such as attentional focusing (the ability to concentrate attention on environmental cues relevant to the task in hand, or to switch attention from one task to another).
  • “What is unique about the locus coeruleus is that it activates almost all higher-order brain centers that are involved in complex cognitive tasks,” says Dr. Mehler.
  • Drs. Purpura and Mehler hypothesize that in autism, the LC-NA system is dysregulated by the interplay of environment, genetic, and epigenetic factors (chemical substances both within as well as outside the genome that regulate the expression of genes). They believe that stress plays a central role in dysregulation of the LC-NA system, especially in the latter stages of prenatal development when the fetal brain is particularly vulnerable.
  • Drs. Purpura and Mehler believe that, in autistic children, fever stimulates the LC-NA system, temporarily restoring its normal regulatory function.
  • the future of autism treatment probably lies in drugs that selectively target certain types of noradrenergic brain receptors or, more likely, in epigenetic therapies targeting genes of the LC-NA system.
  • “You can’t take a complex neuropsychiatric disease that has escaped our understanding for 50 years and in one fell swoop have a therapy that is going to reverse it — that’s folly. On the other hand, we now have clues to the neurobiology, the genetics, and the epigenetics of autism. To move forward, we need to invest more money in basic science to look at the genome and the epigenome in a more focused way.”
  • Tero Toivanen on 08 Jun 09
     
    Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have proposed a sweeping new theory of autism that suggests that the brains of people with autism are structurally normal but dysregulated, meaning symptoms of the disorder might be reversible.
Graeme Wadlow

Altered Auditory and Multisensory Temporal Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC3024004

autism ASD multisensory temporal binding audiovisual sensory processing cross-modal integration

shared by Graeme Wadlow on 04 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Graeme Wadlow on 04 Jan 12
     
    Altered Auditory and Multisensory Temporal Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders
Tero Toivanen

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Recess Essential for Improving Attention - 0 views

eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/...s-essential-for-improving.html

neurolearning recess learning behavior

shared by Tero Toivanen on 02 Mar 09 - Cached
  • New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.
  • Young children with sensory processing disorders are especially susceptible to behavioral and attention problems if they are not allowed to move and exercise throughout their day.
  • Tero Toivanen on 02 Mar 09
     
    New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child's academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.
Tero Toivanen

How to unleash your brain's inner genius - life - 03 June 2009 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...-your-brains-inner-genius.html

savant autism brain genius talent

shared by Tero Toivanen on 04 Jun 09 - Cached
  • A flurry of research published earlier this year in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B paints a very different picture. It turns out that these skills are far more common than previously thought. They may even arise from traits found in the general population, implying that savants are not fundamentally different from the rest of us. What's more, these skills may only blossom after years of obsessive practice, raising the question of whether many more people might cultivate similar skills, if only they had the motivation.
  • One of the biggest clues to the origins of savant talent lies in the fact that savants are far more common within the autistic population than among people with other mental difficulties.
  • Previously, about 1 in 10 people with autism were thought to have a special ability but in April, Patricia Howlin at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London found a much higher figure in the autistic adults she surveyed for savant skills or an exceptional cognitive ability.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Savant skills included more fully developed talents, such as being able to name the elevation of both the sun and the moon at any time of day, on any specified date; being able to name the day of the week for any date in the distant past or future (a talent known as calendrical calculation) and perfect pitch. Importantly, the abilities and the skills had to be exceptional by the standards of the general population, but also well above the individual's overall level of ability. In total, roughly 30 per cent had some kind of special ability (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1359).
  • For musical savants like Paravicini, Happé suggests that a bias towards small details might have led their developing brains to focus more on the exact notes than the overall melody, leading to perfect pitch and an exceptional musical memory. In art, a focus on small regions of a picture could lead to accurate perspective drawing.
  • Most people find this harder when they are shown an unsegmented version of the pattern versus a segmented one, but people with autism don't have this preference, demonstrating their skill at seeing a whole in terms of its parts even if there are no obvious dividing lines (see diagram). "It shows they are able to do the segmentation in their minds," says Winner. The precocious realists did not have this preference either, indicating a talent for realistic drawing may arise from this isolated trait commonly found in autism (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1449).
  • Although these results help to pinpoint exactly what it is about autism that predisposes people to talent, it's still not clear why an eye for detail is more common in autistic people in the first place. Clues might lie in the work of Simon Baron-Cohen from the University of Cambridge, which suggests that people with autism are "hypersensitive" to sensory information
  • Daniel Tammet, a prodigious savant who has memorised pi to 22,514 digits, believes his own talents have arisen from a special ability to connect different pieces of information together. "Savant abilities are linked to a highly associative type of thinking, an extreme form of a kind that everyone does - examples would include daydreaming, puns and the use of metaphors," he says.
  • The few studies of savant brains certainly suggest they are physically different from the average brain. For example, when Happé and Wallace studied the brain of a savant gifted at art, calendrical calculation and memory, they found his cortex was thicker in the areas associated with visuospatial processing and calculation and thinner in other regions associated with social cognition, compared with people who were neither savants nor autistic. But whether these differences were innate or grew with lifelong practice was still unclear.
  • The answer to that question may come from an unlikely source - a study of London taxi drivers who have acquired an encyclopedic memory of the streets of London known as "the Knowledge". Given that taxi drivers must remember the layout of 25,000 streets and the location of thousands of places of interest, and retrieve the information instantaneously, some researchers like Happé believe the Knowledge qualifies as a savant-like skill.
  • Eleanor Maguire and colleagues at the Institute of Neurology at University College London and colleagues found that drivers with the Knowledge have a bigger rear hippocampus than bus drivers and adults who do not drive taxis. In addition, the hippocampus appears to be larger the longer a taxi driver has been working, and shrinks once they retire (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0288).
  • In fact, it seems the remaining mystery is not so much how savants achieve their talents, but what drives them in the first place. "Motivation is a big unknown," says Wallace. "It's an enormous driving force in giftedness and in savants, but we don't know a lot about it."
  • One person who has something of an inside view on what contributes to savant ability is Paravicini's mentor, Adam Ockelford, a professor of music at Roehampton University in London who has watched Paravicini's talent blossom since the age of 4. When they first met, Paravicini was entirely self-taught and bashed at his plastic keyboard with his fists and elbows to reproduce the sounds he was hearing. It was only after years of practice that his technical skills developed.
  • But as researchers like Wallace have suggested, Paravicini seemed motivated way beyond the average music student. In fact, he seemed to be playing as if his life depended on it, and Ockelford thinks it's this that truly sets savants apart from their peers. "The survival instinct gets turned with extraordinary force into something else - in Derek's case music," says Ockelford. "When people see Derek, they think it is amazing, almost religious. But to me, it's mainly just hard work."
  • Tero Toivanen on 04 Jun 09
     
    But now researchers are beginning to unearth clues as to how savants' formidable brains work, and that in turn is changing our view of what it means to be a savant.
Tero Toivanen

The link between autism and extraordinary ability | Genius locus | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm

autism savant extraordinary ability

shared by Tero Toivanen on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music.
  • Francesca Happé of King’s College, London, is one of them. As she observes, obsessional interests and repetitive behaviours would allow someone to practice, albeit inadvertently, whichever skill they were obsessed by. Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.
  • Simon Baron-Cohen, a doyen of the field who works at Cambridge University, draws similar conclusions. He suggests the secret of becoming a savant is “hyper-systematising and hyper-attention to detail”. But he adds sensory hypersensitivity to the list. His team have shown one example of this using what is known as the Freiburg visual acuity and contrast test, which asks people to identify the gap in a letter “c” presented in four different orientations. Those on the autistic spectrum do significantly better at this than do neurotypicals. That might help explain Dr Happé’s observations about coins and raindrops.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The upshot of these differences is that the columns in an autistic brain seem to be more connected than normal with their close neighbours, and less connected with their distant ones. Though it is an interpretative stretch, that pattern of connection might reduce a person’s ability to generalise (since disparate data are less easily integrated) and increase his ability to concentrate (by drawing together similar inputs).
  • Dr Snyder argues that savant skills are latent in everyone, but that access to them is inhibited in non-savants by other neurological processes. He is able to remove this inhibition using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.
  • Tero Toivanen on 24 Apr 09
     
    A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King's College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting.
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20▼ items per page