Sense of Touch

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."  

The sense of touch is our oldest, most primitive and pervasive sense.

It's the first sense we experience in the womb and the last one we lose before death.

The organ that is most associated with touch is the skin on the outside of your body.

And our skin, which has about 50 touch receptors for every square centimeter and about 5 million sensory cells overall, loves to be touched.

The nerve endings in the skin can detect pressure, pain, and temperature.

If you put your hand in a box to search around for something, you can tell when you've found it by feeling the pressure of the object.

The ability to sense pain is a warning device. It warns us to quickly pull our hand away from a hot stove, or not to grab hold of the wrong end of a pair of scissors.

The ability to sense temperature is a safety feature too. It reminds us to bundle up when we go out in winter weather, and to stop and cool off after exercising.

Your sense of touch allows you to tell the difference between rough and smooth, soft and hard, and wet and dry.

Some parts of your skin have more nerve endings that other parts, so some parts are more sensitive to touch than others are.

Your fingertips, tongue, and lips have the most nerve endings.

You do not only have skin and sense of touch on the outside of your body!

You also have 'skin' and touch sense in the inside of your body.

You can feel pain and feel that there is food in your stomach for example.

Or have a sore throat when you have caught a cold.