LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Touch (Sense)
built 633 days ago
Touch is one of the five senses (the others being smell, taste, vision, and hearing) through which animals and people interpret the world around them. While the other senses are localized primarily in a single area (such as visionin the eyes or taste in the tongue), the sensation of touch (or contact withthe outside world) can be experienced anywhere on the body, from the top of the head to the tip of the toe. Touch is based on nerve receptors in the skinthat send electrical messages through the central nervous system to the cerebral cortex in the brain, which interprets these electrical codes. For the most part, the touch receptors specialize in experiencing either hot, cold, pain, or pressure. Arguably, touch is the most important of all the senses; without it animals would not be able to recognize pain (such as scalding water), which would greatly decrease their chances for survival. Research has ... shown that touch has tremendous psychological ramifications in areas like childdevelopment, persuasion, healing, and reducing anxiety and tension.
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Touch is one aspect of the important and varied mechanoreceptive senses. Touch, posture or kinesthetic sense, the vestibular or equilibrium sense, and sound all involve sensitive cells that react to a mechanical stimulus. Deformation of the cell causes a change in electric potentials and the initiation of a nerve impulse. Many of these cells have tactile hairs, such as the hair cells of the semicircular canals and the cochlea. Mammals, notably cats, have vibrissae, 'whiskers', that are very sensitive. Subcutaneous receptors, another kind of sensor, seem to possess sensitive nerve endings.
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Touch continues to have a great psychological impact throughout peoples' lives. Even adults who are hospitalized or sick at home seem to have less anxietyand tension headaches when they are regularly touched or caressed by caretakers or loved ones. Numerous studies have shown that touch ... has a healingpower. Researchers have found that touch reduces rapid heart beats and irregular heart beats (arrhythmias). Another study showed that baby rats who are touched often during infancy develop more receptors to control the production of biochemicals called glucocorticoids, which are known as stress chemicals because of their ability to cause muscle shrinkage, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, and more.
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Touch is ... when between two subjects capable of touch, by necessity reciprocal and essentially unmediated. The medium of the touch would be the hand or other body part, but in this case the medium is also the receptor, and the touch puts two receptors into direct contact.
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Touch results when pressure stimulates receptors in the skin. Their signals pass to the higher centres in the brain via the peripheral nerves, and then the spinal cord. The spinal cord ... receives the input from receptors in muscles and joints that measure how much they are stretched. So the spinal cord is the highway along which the sensory information from the body passes up to the brain. It is also the highway for muscle commands that pass downwards.
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Touch... called [T]actition or mechanoreception, is the sense of pressure perception, generally in the skin. There are a variety of pressure receptors that respond to variations in pressure (e.g., firm, brushing, and sustained). The inability to feel anything or almost anything is called anesthesia. Paresthesia is a sensation of tingling, pricking, or numbness of a person's skin with no apparent long term physical effect.
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