Within the depth-psychology and trauma-therapy corpus, 'processing' operates as a multi-valent technical term spanning at least three distinct registers: neurobiological, psychotherapeutic, and phenomenological. In its neurobiological register — most fully elaborated by Ogden, Shapiro, and Levine — processing names the hierarchical transformation of raw experience across cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor levels, with the triune-brain model providing the primary structural scaffold. Ogden insists that these three levels are interdependent and bidirectional: dysregulated arousal in the aftermath of trauma disrupts integration across all levels simultaneously, producing the symptomatic dissociation and somatic fixity that characterize post-traumatic states. Shapiro's Adaptive Information Processing model, foundational to EMDR, frames processing as the mechanism by which disturbing memory networks are metabolized and linked to adaptive associative networks; blocked processing, in this framework, is the proximate cause of psychopathology. Levine counterbalances the cognitive emphasis with a bottom-up argument: because human beings are 'first and foremost motor creatures,' sensorimotor processing precedes and conditions cognitive reflection rather than the reverse. LeDoux and Lench contribute a cognitive neuroscience perspective on how emotion modulates attentional and information-processing strategies. The key tension across these voices is directional — whether processing is best initiated from above (insight, narrative, cognitive reappraisal) or below (somatic discharge, movement, interoceptive awareness) — a debate with direct clinical stakes for trauma resolution.
In the library
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Flexibility and abstraction of response increase at the higher cognitive level of processing; greater fixity and concreteness of response increase at the sensorimotor level. Emotional processing falls in the middle.
Ogden establishes a hierarchical model in which cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor processing differ in flexibility, and demonstrates how trauma-induced dysregulation disrupts integration across all three levels.
Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
The reptilian brain, first to develop from an evolutionary perspective, governs arousal, homeostasis of the organism, and reproductive drives, and loosely relates to the sensorimotor level of information processing.
Ogden maps Wilber's hierarchical information-processing model onto MacLean's triune-brain framework, establishing the neuroanatomical basis for the cognitive/emotional/sensorimotor triad.
Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
The dual stimulation appears to activate the information-processing system and allows processing to take place. Whether this is due to a direct alteration of the physiological substrate of the targeted network, or through engendering the state of mind necessary for information assimilation, or both, is as yet unknown.
Shapiro argues that EMDR's bilateral stimulation activates a blocked information-processing system, though the precise physiological mechanism responsible for this activation remains an open empirical question.
Shapiro, Francine, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001thesis
Bottom-up processing is more potent than top-down processing in altering our basic perceptions of the world. This potency derives from the fact that we are first and foremost motor creatures.
Levine inverts the standard cognitive primacy assumption, arguing that sensorimotor bottom-up processing is more fundamentally transformative than top-down cognitive or insight-based approaches, particularly for trauma resolution.
Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis
The client's awareness and processing of sensorimotor reactions exert a positive influence on emotional and cognitive processing, and vice versa. Movement and body sensation, as well as thoughts and emotions, are viable targets for intervention.
Ogden establishes that bidirectional feedback among processing levels means both bottom-up and top-down clinical interventions are necessary, with neither alone sufficient for complete trauma resolution.
Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
Learning about these 'brains' can help clients better understand why they think, feel, and act as they do and support integration among these three levels of information processing.
Ogden presents psychoeducation about the triune brain as a clinical tool that makes the concept of multi-level information processing therapeutically accessible and integration-promoting for clients.
Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
We can examine our emotions (mammalian brain); our heart rate, sensations, breathing, and impulses (reptilian brain); and our thoughts or conclusions we are drawing (neocortex). Through mindful awareness of the building blocks that relate to each of these levels, we might learn about how each of our brains is taking in and processing information from our environment.
Ogden operationalizes multi-level processing as a mindfulness practice in which clients simultaneously observe cognitive, emotional, and somatic channels of information intake.
Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
Awareness of how information processing occurs will help clients to understand how bottom-up therapy works. HIJACKING OF YOUR NEOCORTEX explores how the triggering of subcortical reactions can interfere with cortical functioning.
Ogden frames psychoeducation about information-processing hierarchies as stabilizing, explaining symptom formation as neurological hijacking rather than personal failure.
Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
Information processing refers to such things as recognizing the signal value of a stimulus and perhaps responding in some appropriate way. Reading the letter A is an instance of information processing, and so is responding to a red or green traffic light.
This foundational text establishes the basic definition of information processing as the deciphering of stimulus meaning, providing the conceptual ground on which later depth-psychological elaborations build.
James, William, The Principles of Psychology, 1890supporting
When the client feels tension in any area of the body, indicating, for example, that it was suppressed during the original experience, he should be encouraged to act out the associated movement. The sets were repeated as she punched out in front of her and processing resumed.
Shapiro demonstrates that blocked processing can be unblocked by facilitating suppressed physical action, illustrating how somatic completion reinstates the adaptive information-processing trajectory.
Shapiro, Francine, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
When participants were led to adopt a systematic information-processing strategy, inducing sadness led them to shift to using more global processing, whereas inducing happiness led to continued use of local processing.
Lench presents experimental evidence that affective state dynamically regulates information-processing strategy, shifting between global and local modes in response to emotional valence.
Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
The medial prefrontal cortex may be able to elevate amygdala output activity and thereby boost cortical processing of threats. This would facilitate reentrant processing between CCNs involving prefrontal/parietal areas and sensory processing and enhance conscious awareness of the threat.
LeDoux details how amygdala-prefrontal reentrant circuits amplify sensory processing of threats, linking nonconscious detection mechanisms to the cortical processing that underlies conscious threat awareness.
LeDoux, Joseph, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, 2015supporting
Higher progesterone levels enhance inhibitory GABA-transmission in non-clinical populations, promoting information processing by suppressing irrelevant neural activity.
Wynchank demonstrates that hormonal fluctuations across the menstrual cycle modulate information-processing efficiency, implicating neuroendocrine factors in the variability of attentional and executive processing.
Wynchank, Dora, Menstrual Cycle-Related Hormonal Fluctuations in ADHD: Effect on Cognitive Functioning—A Narrative Review, 2025supporting
The anterior insula is important for translating emotional salience into activation of the cognitive control network to implement goal-directed behavior.
Paulus positions the anterior insula as a critical interface node where interoceptive and emotional processing is translated into cognitive control, relevant to understanding how processing failures contribute to addictive behavior.
Paulus, Martin P., Interoception and drug addiction, 2014supporting
When they induced bihemispheric activation with bilateral eye movements prior to memory retrieval, they found that episodic priming was associated with bihemispheric processing in which encoding and retrieval took place in opposite hemispheres.
Shapiro cites neuroimaging evidence suggesting that bilateral eye movements facilitate bihemispheric processing, offering a candidate mechanism for EMDR's reprocessing effects on episodic memory.
Shapiro, Francine, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001aside