Sensory gating describes neurological processes of filtering out redundant or unnecessary stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli.

Also referred to as gating or filtering, sensory gating prevents an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers of the brain. Sensory gating can also occur in different forms through changes in both perception and sensation, affected by various factors such as "arousal, recent stimulus exposure, and selective attention.”

In conditions such as traumatic brain injury, the neural mechanisms that are responsible for gating or filtering can be “turned off,” allowing what used to be more tolerable stimuli to become an overload of stimulation for the brain.