By: Kristine S.

Alfaro
 Touch is the oldest of all senses, it is
the foundation of our existence. Our
whole conception of what exist
outside us, is based upon the sense of
touch.
 Our sense of touch is controlled by a huge
network of nerve endings and touch
receptors in the skin known as the
somatosensory system. This system is
responsible for all the sensations we feel
cold, hot, smooth, rough, pressure, tickle,
itch, pain, vibrations, and more. Within the
somatosensory system, there are four main
types of receptors: mechanoreceptors,
thermoreceptors, pain receptors, and
proprioceptors.
 Before we dig further into these specialized
receptors, it is important to understand how
they adapt to a change in stimulus
(anything that touches the skin and causes
sensations such as hot, cold, pressure,
tickle, etc). A touch receptor is
considered rapidly adapting if it responds
to a change in stimulus very quickly.
Basically this means that it can sense right
away when the skin is touching an object
and when it stops touching that object.
 These receptors perceive sensations such as
pressure, vibrations, and texture. There are
four known types of mechanoreceptors
whose only function is to perceive
indentions and vibrations of the skin:
Merkel's disks, Meissner's corpuscles,
Ruffini's corpuscles, and Pacinian
corpuscles.
 As their name suggests, these receptors perceive sensations
related to the temperature of objects the skin feels. They are
found in the dermis layer of the skin. There are two basic
categories of thermoreceptors: hot and cold receptors.

Cold receptors start to perceive cold sensations when the

surface of the skin drops below 95 F. They are most
stimulated when the surface of the skin is at 77 F and are no
longer stimulated when the surface of the skin drops below
41 F. This is why your feet or hands start to go numb when
they are submerged in icy water for a long period of time.

Hot receptors start to perceive hot sensations when the

surface of the skin rises above 86 F and are most stimulated
at 113 F. But beyond 113 F, pain receptors take over to
avoid damage being done to the skin and underlying tissues.
 The scientific term is nocireceptor. Noci- in Latin means
injurious or hurt which is a good clue that these receptors
detect pain or stimuli that can or does cause damage to the skin
and other tissues of the body. There are over three million pain
receptors throughout the body, found in skin, muscles, bones,
blood vessels, and some organs. They can detect pain that is
caused by mechanical stimuli (cut or scrape), thermal stimuli
(burn), or chemical stimuli (poison from an insect sting).

These receptors cause a feeling of sharp pain to encourage you

to quickly move away from a harmful stimulus such as a broken
piece of glass or a hot stove stop. They also have receptors that
cause a dull pain in an area that has been injured to encourage
you not to use or touch that limb or body part until the damaged
area has healed. While it is never fun to activate these receptors
that cause pain, they play an important part in keeping the body
safe from serious injury or damage by sending these early
warning signals to the brain.
 In Latin, the word proprius means one's own
and is used in the name of these receptors because
they sense the position of the different parts of the
body in relation to each other and the surrounding
environment. Proprioceptors are found in tendons,
muscles, and joint capsules. This location in the
body allows these special cells to detect changes in
muscle length and muscle tension. Without
proprioceptors, we would not be able to do
fundamental things such as feeding or clothing
ourselves.
 Of course, none of the sensations felt by the somatosensory system
would make any difference if these sensations could not reach the brain.
The nervous system of the body takes up this important task.

Neurons (which are specialized nerve cells that are the smallest unit of
the nervous system) receive and transmit messages with other neurons
so that messages can be sent to and from the brain. This allows the
brain to communicate with the body. When your hand touches an object,
the mechanoreceptors in the skin are activated, and they start a chain of
events by signaling to the nearest neuron that they touched something

This neuron then transmits this message to the next neuron which
gets passed on to the next neuron and on it goes until the message
is sent to the brain. Now the brain can process what your hand
touched and send messages back to your hand via this same
pathway to let the hand know if the brain wants more information
about the object it is touching or if the hand should stop touching it.