Sensory Integration - Overview

Overview

It has been believed for some time that inputs from different sensory organs are processed in different areas in the brain, relating to systems neuroscience. Using functional neuroimaging, it can be seen that sensory-specific cortices are activated by different inputs. For example, regions in the occipital cortex are tied to vision and those on the superior temporal gyrus are recipients of auditory inputs. There exist studies suggesting deeper multisensory convergences than those at the sensory-specific cortices, which were listed earlier. This convergence of multiple sensory modalities is known as sensory integration.

Sensory integration deals with how the brain processes sensory input from multiple sensory modalities. These include the five classic senses of vision (sight), audition (hearing), tactile stimulation (touch), olfaction (smell), and gustation (taste). Other sensory modalities exist, for example the vestibular sense (balance and the sense of movement) and proprioception (the sense of knowing one's position in space). It is important that the information of these different sensory modalities must be relatable. The sensory inputs themselves are in different electrical signals, and in different contexts. Through sensory integration, the brain can relate all sensory inputs into a coherent percept, upon which our interaction with the environment is ultimately based.