Touch+and+Pain+P2-+Sara+and+Anna

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The sense of touch can be stimulated by various factors. These factors include: light touch, heavy touch, vibration, pressure, heat, and pain. Pain is a specific and particularly intense type of touch sensation that has been proven to be linked to emotion and survival. The sense of pain, just like the sense of touch, can be stimulated by specific experiences. A person’s sense of pain will activate in response to feelings of tearing, puncturing, burning, and sharp pressure. The senses of touch and pain both originate from the contact from an outside force with the skin. The skin is made up of three layers. The middle layer, called the dermis, is the most dense because it is home to all of the nerve endings that lead into the body. If a human comes into contact with something that puts enough pressure on the outer layer of skin to active the nerves on the dermal layer, a person will experience the sense of touch. Once a nerve is activated in the dermis, the nerves will send a signal to activate nerve fibers that travel through the spinal cord and up into the brain stem. Once the nerve signals reach the brain, they are sent through the thalamus. After this, the cells are processed in the area of the cerebral cortex that is dedicated to the specific body part that has been touched. The amount of space in the cortex that is dedicated to each body part depends on the density of nerve endings in that part of the body.