Similar to most humans, you are aware of the importance of your ability to hear and see in order to function in everyday life: the thought of becoming blind or deaf is extremely distressing. But what about the importance of the sense of touch? If you walk around the house in the middle of the night, being able to do so without hurting yourself 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 mostly on sight without using the sensation of touch at all to find it, by the time you find it, it will have stopped ringing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't 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, texture, which are all essential characteristics for our interactions with the environment and objects in it contents. The sense of touch could also serve another important purpose. Although sight is often thought to be the most uplifting sense, we should consider the sense of touch as the most reliable. If we were to reach for air, only to feel nothing but air, which of your senses would you rely on? In situations or conflicts like these, we would most likely trust our sense of touch over others. The information we obtain with direct interaction with the object (or without interaction) cannot be easily denied. The sense of touch uses several types of receptors called mechanoreceptors. These receptors are found in the skin and respond directly to mechanical stimulation, pressure, or deformation of the skin. Two of these mechanoreceptors are Merkel discs and Meissner corpuscles and are located immediately beneath the surface of the skin. These two types of mechanoreceptors have small, punctuated receptive fields, which means they respond to tactile information coming from a certain area of ​​the skin. That said, these receptors are responsible for encrypting fine details of tactile stimuli such as texture. To recognize and appreciate the importance of these mechanoreceptors, we must take into account the density of the Meissner corpuscles found on the tops of the eyelids and on the fingertips. They slowly decrease from 450 per square millimeter of skin during late adolescence to around 10 per square millimeter by the time you reach your 50s. The decline of these receptors accurately predicts the loss of sensitivity to distinct tactile information that older people experience. Two other types of mechanoreceptors are Pacinian corpuscles and Ruffini terminals and reside in deeper locations in the skin. These receptors are different from Meissner corpuscles and Merkel disks because they have large, diffuse receptive fields and respond to tactile information over a much larger, fuzzier area and provide "bigger picture" information about the nature of a tactile stimulus . . The sizes of the fields of all four types of mechanoreceptors vary throughout the body. When the dimensions of the fields are smaller they provide more detailed and precise information, in the parts of the body that are important in the evolutionary aspect for our body such as the fingertips and lips. Mechanoreceptors also differ in their speed of adaptation. Both Meissner and Pacinian corpuscles adapt very quickly. they respond quickly when a tactile stimulus first comes into contact with the skin and when the stimulus is removed, but little in between. In contrast, Ruffini's endings and Merkel's records fit.