Do you have a kiddo who has been diagnosed with a learning, behavioral, or socialization challenge? Or maybe one who you suspect is struggling to meet the normal milestones in these areas? You are not alone. The rate of children with these diagnoses is skyrocketing and it does not seem to be slowing down any time soon. There are many factors that play into deviating from normal brain growth and development and neurostructural shift is one of them.

Generally speaking, the brain develops from the bottom(brainstem)-up, inside-out, and right to left. As the brain grows and develops from in utero to the first months and years of life, our behaviors follow a certain pattern. These behaviors help us to interact with and learn from our world. In utero through the first year of life, we rely heavily on primitive reflexes. These movements are very impulsive, they aid in the birth process and help our primitive brains interact with the world around us to survive in the first year of life. Around the first birthday, the brain begins to rely more heavily on movement and touch to interact and grow. Our little cruisers are grabbing everything in sight, putting everything in their mouths, and they cannot sit still for even a second. They are using all of this sensory input to feed their growing brains for the second year of life. This begins to overlap with auditory and verbal interaction around 18 months of age. Our little ones start to recognize that if we make sounds at them and they make sounds back at us, we are doing this cool thing called communicating. This is otherwise known as the “language explosion.” Now, if we have properly hit all of these stages, we begin to develop our visual cognitive skills. At this stage, we are able to feed off of past experiences to visualize the consequences of our actions and other future scenarios, and we are able to walk into a room and “touch everything with our eyes” instead of having to pick everything up, touch and feel everything, or ask a bunch of questions about it. This skill continues to develop until it becomes the main tool we use to interact with our world.

Now, where does neurostructural shift come into play? Neurostructural shift, and the secondary compensations that it results in, interfere with the way that our brain processes information. This results in altered input to the brain, altered sensory processing in the brain, and altered output in the form of actions. When this altered processing occurs, we can deviate from this normal trajectory of brain growth, which ultimately hinders us from fully developing and using our visual cognitive skills. 

So when a child or adult is faced with stressors, whether they are physical, chemical, or emotional stressors, the demand for use of visual cognition becomes too high, and they revert back to the lower forms of interaction with the environment. Sometimes this results in individuals who are overly talkative or constantly repeat words, sounds, or phrases (echolalia), individuals with hyperactive behavior or inattentiveness, or even retention or re-emergence of some primitive reflexes.

There are several different therapies that are very successful at treating the individual symptoms that result from neurodivergence. Our approach begins with removing the root of this deviation by correcting neurostructural shift, restoring normal brain function, and oftentimes working with other therapy providers to get these individuals back on track and living life to their fullest potential.