Distractibility & Sensory Over-Responsivity

Removing the Stigma Surrounding Sensory Differences

All information by the STAR Institute  

There are a lot of sensory body-based reasons that make paying attention truly difficult. Sensory over-responsivity is just one possible cause.

Have you ever been in a situation where you have to work so hard on looking like you are paying attention that you don’t actually hear anything anyone said?

Internally you are trying to ignore the smell of the cleaning agents, the buzz of a fly, the hum of the air conditioning, or the flicker of the lights. All of these stimuli are equally intense and demanding of your attention (this is known as sensory over-responsivity) that you can’t remember what was even being said.

Sense modulation is one part of the sensory integration. In order to understand sensory modulation it is helpful to think about the sound at a concert. When the singer sings into the microphone, the sound travels down a wire that is connected to the receiver and might even pass through a sound desk before it reaches the point of recording. The quality of the wire and the connections will significantly influence the characteristics of the sound output – including the amplitude and frequency of the sound. You can think of sensory modulation in the same way, except sensory modulation happens in all of our many sensory systems.

Every sensory event triggers an electrical-chemical signal that travels along our neurons and across synapses. One aspect of this takes place as the signal is traveling to the higher region of the brain.

At each synapse, the sensory message is transferred to the next neuron or target. Sensory modulation happens at these junctions. Modulation involves facilitating some neural messages to maximize a response and inhibiting other messages to reduce irrelevant activity.

A process that for many people takes place subconsciously, for others causes discomfort and anxiety all the time. This can happen in one, multiple, or all of our sensory systems.

Sensory modulation can be different in different brains. Sometimes as the message travels to the higher regions of the brain it is amplified and gets bigger than it actually was. When this happens the body experiences the sensory even as more intense or the same intensity as everything else.

So sitting in a classroom and focusing on one sensory stream (for example the teacher's voice) and filtering out all the other sensory data, becomes a herculean task.

Over-responsivity to what we see can mean that looking at someone's face provides a flood of sensory information. There's so much data being processed all at once that maintaining eye contact AND listening seems almost impossible. You have to choose one or the other. When we do sustain eye contact while being spoken to we cannot process what is being said. If we choose to look away to better listen we seem like we are distracted and not engaged in the conversation.

"Listening does not have a look." i-asc.org

Have you ever noticed that talking or thinking about eye contact makes it harder or uncomfortable?

As soon as you are looking at a person in the eyes requires conscious attention it takes energy away from other tasks. This is why, in many situations, you can listen better if you look away.

What if we recognized and respected the different ways people may listen best?

Different people, especially neurodivergent people, need to do different things with their bodies to support attention and listening. Do not assume someone is inattentive or distractible based on your judgements of how they should look and connect.