![]() ![]() Kick it too hard and you could break a bone. Touching the door jamb gently isn’t harmful. They respond to strong stimuli, telling you when something is truly dangerous. Nociceptors are attuned to stimuli that cause tissue damage. Both a sensory and emotional experience, pain signals tissue damage or the potential for damage and makes the experience feel unpleasant and upsetting.Īfter your toe encounters the door jamb, special sensory neurons, nociceptors, respond to the impact. Primarily a warning signal, pain is the brain’s way of signaling something is wrong with the body. Stub your toe on a door jamb too hard and you’ll feel an uncomfortable sensation: pain. But you can distinguish two stimuli on your back only if they’re several centimeters apart. Perception is greatest where the two-point threshold is lowest, in the most densely nerve-packed areas, like fingers and lips. Neurologists measure sensitivity by examining the minimum distance between two points on the skin a person can identify as distinct stimuli rather than a single stimulus. Unlike the very sensitive lips and hands, receptors on your back are few and far apart so it’s much less sensitive. A region’s sensitivity depends on the number of receptors per unit area and the distance between them. Sensitive areas, like lips and fingertips, stimulate much larger regions of the cortex than less sensitive parts. Somatosensory information from all over the body spreads onto the cortex forming a topographic map that curls around the brain like headphones. Next stop is the somatosensory cortex, where signals are translated into a touch perception. Then signals move to the thalamus, which relays information to the rest of the brain. They travel along sensory nerves made up of bundled fibers that connect to neurons in the spinal cord. Sensations begin as signals generated by touch receptors in your skin. If your friend grips your hand so hard it hurts, touch lets you know something is wrong or dangerous through the feeling of pain. The sense of touch conveys important social information, helping strengthen bonds between people. ![]() When holding your friend’s hand, you feel the heat from their skin, the softness or roughness of their palm, and the pressure from their fingers. ![]()
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