Soft touch

Touch - I’ve had a harder time trying to verbalize this sense. While the other four senses (sight, hearing, smell, and taste) are located in specific parts of the body, your sense of touch is found all over. This is because of many tiny nerve endings in the dermis which give you information about the things with which your body comes in contact. They do this by carrying the information to the spinal cord, which sends messages to the brain where the feeling is registered.

The nerve endings in your skin can tell you if something is hot or cold. They can also feel if something is hurting you. Your body has about twenty differnt types of nerve endings that all send messages to your brain. However, the most common receptors are heat, cold, pain, and pressure or touch receptors. Pain receptors are probably the most important for your safety because they can protect you by warning your brain that your body is hurt!

Some areas of the body are more sensitive than others because they have more nerve endings. Ever bitten your tongue and wondered why it hurt so much? It’s because the sides of the tongue have a lot of nerve endings that are sensitive to pain. However, your tongue is not as good at sensing hot or cold. That is why it is easy to burn your mouth when you eat something really hot. Fingertips are also very sensitive.


Interesting but useless facts:

• The least sensitive part of your body is the middle of your back.
• The most sensitive areas of your body are your hands, lips, face, neck, tongue, fingertips and feet.
• Shivering is a way your body has of trying to get warmer.
• There are about 100 touch receptors in each of your fingertips.
• Rattlesnakes use their skin to feel the body heat of other animals

Touch is one of the lesser senses that we don’t really appreciate how important it can be. The sense of touch or feeling adds texture to our lives. To feel the softness of a baby or the hardness of cold steel is something we can remember for a long time. Some feelings or touches I recall from my life are:

1. Holding a newborn child – indescribable feeling of holding a tiny soul in your hands and knowing you are responsible for him/her.
2. Petting a dog – Petting my dog (and cat) was always soothing to me. No matter how crappy my day was or what challenges life had put in front of me, Shadow always seemed to understand the situation and was available for some spiritual renewal. Nothing like a good belly rub or scratching his head seemed to make a lot of problems smaller.
3. Tickling – I am not overly ticklish, but my wife is. Some people find it funny while others find it torture.
4. Pain –What does not kill us, makes us stronger. Pain, while it may build character, sucks. I have had my fill of pain lately with my shoulder injury. In the ER, they ask you to give them some indication of how bad is your pain by drawing a circle around a facial expression (happy face = no pain, grump face = mild pain, screaming face = severe agony). I was hurting but I rated it as mild when compared to the others in the ER. Perhaps if I had rated it higher, I would have been treated sooner, but, honestly, there were other people in there with worse injuries/illnesses than I had. That little trip was over a month ago and I am still hurting. Just did anther round at the therapist and my arm hurts. I don’t mean to whine, but I am living on Advil and scotch this evening.
5. Hot – Don’t touch that. It’s hot. Ever been burned? When I was young (~4), I pulled a full cup of coffee off the table down onto my arm & leg and got scalded. That kind of pain takes a long while to recover from.
6. Cold – I hate the cold. Oh, I love snow and snow skiing. Even lived in New Jersey and Germany for years, but I still hate the cold. One winter while in the Army on maneuvers in Hoenfels, Germany, my feet got wet and I almost got frostbite. Ever since then, I am very sensitive to cold temps. That’s why I live in Texas.
7. Rough – toilet paper. Need I say more?
8. Sticky – cotton candy from the state fare.
9. Soft – feather pillows on a king size bed with a down comforter. Soft leather jacket.
10. Hard – as a diamond. Hard candy. Hard hat. Hard ass.