Like most humans, you are aware of the importance of your ability to hear and see to function in everyday life. The idea of ​​becoming blind or deaf is extremely distressing. But what about the importance of your sense of touch? If you walk through your house in the middle of the night, being able to escape without injury depends not only on your cognitive map but also on your tactile sensations. For example, when you're trying to find your vibrating cell phone in your backpack, if you rely primarily on your vision without using your tactile sensation at all to help you find it, by the time you find it, it will have stopped to ring. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The sense of touch shows not only the existence of an object, but also details about an object's size, firmness, shape, and texture, all of which are essential features of our interactions with nature. environment and the objects found there. The sense of touch might also serve another important purpose. Although vision is often considered to be the most edifying sense, the sense of touch should be considered the most reliable. If we were to reach for air and feel nothing but air, which of your senses would you rely on? In situations or conflicts like this, we would most likely trust our sense of touch over others. The information we pick up during direct interaction with the object (or lack of interaction) cannot be easily denied. The sense of touch uses several different types of receptors called mechanoreceptors. These receptors are located in the skin and respond directly to mechanical stimulation, pressure or deformation of the skin. Two of these mechanoreceptors are Merkel's discs and Meissner's corpuscles and they are found immediately below the surface of the skin. These two types of mechanoreceptors have small, punctate receptive fields, meaning they respond to tactile information coming from a certain area of ​​the skin. That being said, these receptors are responsible for encrypting the fine details of tactile stimuli like texture. To recognize and appreciate the importance of these mechanoreceptors, consider the density of Meissner's corpuscles which are located on the top of the eyelids and at the tips of the fingers. They slowly decrease from 40 to 50 per square millimeter of skin in your late teens to around 10 per square millimeter by the time you reach age 50. The decline of these receptors accurately predicts the loss of sensitivity to distinct tactile information that older adults experience. .Two other types of mechanoreceptors are Pacinian corpuscles and Ruffini endings, and they reside in deeper positions in the skin. These receptors are different from Meissner corpuscles and Merkel discs because they have large, diffuse receptive fields and respond to tactile information over a much larger, indistinct area, and provide a "broader picture" type of information about the nature of a tactile stimulus. . The field size of the four types of mechanoreceptors varies throughout the body. When the field size is smaller, they provide more detailed and accurate information about body parts that are important in the evolutionary aspect of our body, such as the fingertips and lips. Mechanoreceptors also differ in their rate of adaptation. Meissner corpuscles and Pacinian corpuscles adapt very quickly. they react quickly when a stimulus.