One of the five senses, where sensations are felt by part of the skin, especially by the fingers and lips. The sense of touch relates to the body’s ability to sense touch, vibration, pressure, temperature, and pain. The skin, muscles, joints, tendons, and organs all have receptors that sense touch. These sensations are consciously perceived in the cerebrum, the largest and most developed part of the brain. The brain interprets these sensations variously as pleasing, displeasing, or neutral. Factors such as medication and brain injury can affect how a person interprets sensations.
The sense that enables an individual to assess the physical characteristics of objects for example, their size, shape, temperature and texture. The sense of touch is considered here along with other senses associated with the skin and muscles.
To perceive by the tactile sense; to feel with the hands, to palpate.
The ability to perceive specific attributes of objects, such as their shape, size, temperature, and surface texture, through direct physical contact.
The skin is equipped with various kinds of touch receptors, including Meissner’s corpuscles and Merkel’s discs, responsible for detecting gentle touches, as well as Pacinian corpuscles that sense deep pressure and vibrations. Signals originating from these receptors travel through sensory nerves to the spinal cord, subsequently reaching the thalamus in the brain, and ultimately advancing to the sensory cortex. In the sensory cortex, touch sensations are perceived and interpreted.
There’s a noticeable contrast in touch sensitivity among different body regions. For instance, the fingertips exhibit a much higher sensitivity to touch compared to the trunk.
The ability to perceive an object’s characteristics through touch, particularly with the fingers; the sense of touch.