Sense Of Touch

1 Pages 373 Words

Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the womb. By as early as eight weeks, embryos respond to a gentle touch on the cheek, and by thirty-two weeks, every part of their body is sensitive to touch, pain, and temperature. At twelve weeks or so, babies may begin sucking their thumbs, and soon they will be exploring their world through touch. Your other four senses: sight, hearing, smell, and taste are located in specific parts of the body, but your sense of touch is found all over, and your skin is the largest sensory organ of your body. While there are about one hundred touch receptors in each of your fingertips alone, the sense of touch is essential for every square inch of your body. It involves sensory terminals that are dispersed over the outside and inside of the body. This system encodes a variety of sensations in addition to touch, such as pain, vibration, pressure, stretch, itch, texture, and temperature. The system is sensitive to certain chemical states like painful tissue acidity, the result of inflammation or infection. Each receptor in your skin is located in the dermis. Through the dermis the receptors send the information though nerve fibers to the spinal cord which then send the information directly to the brain, where the sensations are identified and their origin on the body pinpointed. Pain receptors are probably the most important of the receptors for your safety because they can protect you by warning your brain that your body is getting hurt.
For us touch is rarely thought of to be important and sometimes taken for granted, however, this sense is highly refined. No special skill is needed to feel the difference between a smooth pane of glass and one etched with grooves 1/2500 of an inch deep. More often than not, we take note of a surface we touch, we then establishing its hardness, softness and its smoothness or roughness, and whether it is dry, wet, slippery or sticky. Between fingers and thumb we get ind...