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A touching tale: point sensor or pattern detector?

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 1290–1291 (2014)Cite this article

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The tactile sensors in our fingers have variable sensitivity across the skin. Does this variability harm or help the CNS in touch perception? Work now shows that this variability may provide the CNS with more information about micropositioning and stimulus orientation.

The sensory nerves in your fingertips are the gateways to touch. The dense innervation of the tips enables sensation of texture and roughness and the positioning of the fingers for tactile manipulations1. These sensory nerves have extensive branching in the dermis of the skin, and each single axon contacts many sensory organs. This unusual pseudodendritic arrangement has attracted relatively little study, and for the most part neuroscience has treated peripheral nerves as though this branching did not even exist. Now work by Pruszynski and Johansson2 in this issue of Nature Neuroscience demonstrates unequivocally that the integrative properties of the axonal arborization are more complex than previously appreciated3. The arrangement of each axonal arbor may provide the CNS with usable information about micropositioning and stimulus orientation.

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Figure 1: Tactile study of peripheral nerve arrangement.

Debbie Maizels/Nature Publishing Group

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  1. David T. Blake is at the Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute, Georgia Regents University, Augusta, Georgia, USA.,

    David T Blake

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Correspondence to David T Blake.

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Blake, D. A touching tale: point sensor or pattern detector?. Nat Neurosci 17, 1290–1291 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3820

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