Weighted Blankets and Heavy Words: Sensory Terminology Demystified

Developing a New Lexicon for Sensory Experiences

It’s All About Communication

Have you ever heard of “The Empathy Toy”? It’s an activity developed by a company called 21 Toys where one person is blindfolded and has a tactile puzzle they need to solve, and the other person is not blindfolded, but is not allowed to touch anything or help in any way other than giving verbal directions to the blindfolded person.

This exercise is meant to test both people’s communication skills.

• One person has to learn how to give helpful directions without being able to be directly involved
• The other person has to use the given directions, without complete information, trust it, and get to the solution.

Having worked in a call center doing tech support one summer many years ago, I can tell you what a MASSIVE challenge it can be to have to give directions to someone when you can’t see or touch the thing they’re trying to solve. And technology is essentially its own language, so it’s kind of like trying to teach someone a second language over the phone.

Language is the foundational infrastructure of human systems and experiences.

There is a saying: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

When the available vocabulary is primitive or simplistic, the throughput of the entire communication network is bottlenecked. Everything is going to seem samey and indistinct.

So what do you do if your experience doesn’t align with others? What if you can’t name it? Or what if you try to, using the only words you have, yet other people just don’t understand you?

Worse yet - what if you are non-verbal? Taking away an entire communication medium is a nightmare, and yet that is some people’s permanent, lived reality.

Here is a prime example that I recall from the 2000s:

From a systems thinking perspective, this highlights the 'Social Model of Disability.' Carly's mind was fully functional (she is clearly very intelligent and even humourous); the systemic failure was the environment's lack of an interface (like an AAC device) to receive her data format. Many autistic people (including verbal ones) understand this frustration.

‘Infodumping’ is a typical communication format for us, but to receive an ‘infodump’ unprepared is like trying to take a calm shower and getting hit with a flash flood.

Unfortunately, being misunderstood and struggling to communicate is how a lot of neurodivergent people feel, especially before they learn what neurodiversity is.

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard or read autistic or ADHD people saying ‘when I finally learned that there was a name for my experience, it made me feel so validated and I finally felt like I was in fact not crazy or broken’

But what if you never found out your experience had a name?

The first new word I’m going to teach you is Autodidact. It’s a word I learned many years ago that means ‘self-taught’ or to teach one’s self.

Auto = self, and didactism = teaching.

Now you might be thinking ‘oh, so ‘didact’ must be where the word ‘redact’ comes from’. I thought so too. Turns out, ‘redact’ actually derives from the Latin redactus meaning to drive back/bring back. It’s not the only ‘false friend’ between languages.

Earlier this year, I began to stumble into more scientific and medical terminology, which just so happens to be based heavily in ancient Greek. It turns out in English, we actually use a ton of Greek words, and I think most of us have no idea.

EXAMPLES: Autism, Autograph, Autopsy, Anesthesia, Epilepsy, Nercolepsy, Endoscopy, Telescope, Periscope, Microphone, Telephone, Oxygen, Chiropractor, Emphasis, Ecstacy, Euphoria, Nostalgia, Atmosphere, Hypothermia, Anemia, Probiotic, Kleptomaniac, Hypochondriac, Organic, Genetic, Synthetic, Hypothesis, Amphibian. All Greek!

All of those words are Greek! And they are all made up of 2 or more root words.

I had already been aware of terms like hyperacusis or photophobia, but I had not realized they were rooted in Greek. I started to go down the rabbit hole and unlocked a whole new universe of understanding to myself.

The Sensory Periodic Table

And this is how the “Sensory Periodic Table” was born. Think of it as a reference architecture.

It started as a personal passion project to build a structured, multi-dimensional matrix to classify overlapping sensory variables, turning chaos into an organized data set that other people can use.

[get your copy of the sensory periodic table for free at SensoryNerd.com]

It’s a chart that I built that has each column representing a different sensory channel/type, and each row representing a different state of experience. Like excessive, deficient, multiple, distorted, or ‘off’.

So for example, if you wanted to know the technical term for a ‘supersmeller’, you cross reference the appropriate column (osmoception - sense of smell) and row (hyper - excessive) and you get: Hyperosmia.

a.k.a. Excessive ability to perceive scent/smell.

I became fascinated because I was like ‘well surely, if one can have hyper sensitive hearing or sight, then they can have hyper sensitive other senses also?’, and so I began to research and that resulted in me building this reference sheet (for my own purposes originally).

Then I began to look up other things, and in a couple of weeks I’d begun to learn ancient Greek and find words for so many things and have an ongoing series of ‘aha!’ moments.

The More You ‘Gno’

Now let me be clear - the point with this is not to say ‘hey reader, you and everyone you know should learn all this ancient Greek like I have!’

This is just what my autistic brain likes to do (and is naturally good at).

But think back to the earlier example of ‘finding the name for an experience and having your life make a little more sense to you’, there are several experiences that people have, that we don’t really have terms for, just a clunky way of describing them.

So let’s look at some examples that I hope will be helpful and motivating.

I made the above graphic in part because I wanted a way to more easily keep ‘phasia’ and ‘phania’ clear in my head. I kept having these moments where I’d think of a word and it was like ‘oh! that’s rooted in X!’

To be honest, learning Greek has felt a bit like rediscovering air. Suddenly one day I realize ‘I’ve been living in this stuff my whole life and it was always just there but I didn’t think about it at all really’.

Fun fact: Oxygen also derives from Greek: Oxy meaning sharp and gen like genesis. Oxygen translates to ‘sharpness making’. It was misnamed in confusion and the name stuck.

Here are some useful terms:

First example: “auditory processing disorder”. It’s a clinical term, but it’s clunky and ineffecient to say. But there is a ‘simple’ word for that: Dysakroasis.

Dys = bad or impaired
Akroasis = the act of hearing or listening.

You might be thinking ‘oh, so that’s what Deafness is called’.

Actually no, Deafness would be Anacusis.
An = without, and acusis = ability to perceive sound.

Ability to perceive sound and the act of actually listening are different things, with different terms. This is why the chart is helpful!

Or another example - an experience many neurodivergent (and sometimes even neurotypical) people are familiar with - when you get so locked into a hyper-focus spell that you forget to eat or go to the bathroom for 10 hours straight, we just call that a ‘hyper-focus spell where we forget to eat or pee for too long’. But that’s a huge mouthful.

What is the underlying phenomenon? Intero-agnosia.

Interoception is our ability to perceive our internal body state - hunger, bladder and bowels, digestion, heart beat, etc. And ‘Agnosia’ means ‘without knowing’.

Another example is how many people find weighted blankets, or a firm-squeeze hug to be very comforting and calming. ‘Weighted blanket’ is a more common term now, but why does a weighted blanket make you feel good? Most people don’t know how, they just know that it does.

But what if I told you it’s because of Piezo-Galenosis? aka ‘calming physical pressure’?

Piezo = to press or squeeze.
Galenos = calm, serene, or tranquil.

You combine them, and you get ‘calmness through squeezing/compression’.

There, now you have another tool in your verbal toolbox. Hammers are NOT meant for everything!

Neologisms aka ‘Invented Words’

On the flipside, I have also decided to create terms for concepts that we already have shorthand for. These are more ‘for interest’s sake’

If you’re in the neurodiversity community, you’re probably already familiar with ‘stimming’, ‘infodumping’, and ‘masking’. But for anyone who has never heard of these things, they might not intuitively know what they mean.

For ‘stimming’, I came up with ‘autostatic praxia’ which translates to ‘self-steadying action’. This is an instance where the existing term is shorter and easier to say, so I don’t expect my custom term to replace it. But it’s there for anyone who is interested.

Masking is probably the most notable one here for being a bit more vague. At first I went direct - the Greek word for mask is prosopon so ‘masking’ would be ‘prosopony’.

But it’s more metaphorical as a concept. You’re not literally wearing a mask, you’re obscuring your real self and projecting what will ‘blend in better’. And for that, I have two terms for you:

Autocryptia (aka self concealment) and Pseudopraxia (aka false conduct).

It’s basically the internal and external aspects of the act of ‘masking’.

If ‘masking’ is the house, autocryptia is the structure/foundation, and pseudopraxia is the wallpaper/paint.

In system design, this is known as a wrapper or an emulation layer, hiding the core system operations to remain compatible with an rigid external network.

To Feel, or Not To Feel?

One last set of examples for now.

Here are some more words that you will know at least one of. If you’ve ever had a major surgery, or had teeth pulled, you’ve probably been put under anesthesia. But do you know what it actually means?

These terms tend to be more clinical/medical, but I have also heard from a few people that when they learned the concept of Alexithymia, it was an ‘aha!’ moment for them.

And it’s a fitting way to round out this post, because we’ve talked about the external form of not being able to communicate, or receive information, but what if you can’t actually describe how you feel? That’s like having no tools at all to relate your experience, and that in and of itself is an unsettling way to exist.

And now you have been “Xeno-didactized’ - taught by the other.

For more, head over to SensoryNerd.com to download the Sensory Terminology Interpretation Manual (STIM) for free.

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Lacey Artemis (she/they) aka The Sensory Nerd is a neurodivergent speaker, consultant, and researcher focused on systems-level sensory inclusion and design. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting, where her applied research and advisory work supports more comfortable, sensory-accessible public spaces.

Lacey is Autistic and has sensory processing issues that affect her in a variety of ways.
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