Somatosensory system facts for kids
The 'somatosensory system' is a sensory system that detects experiences labelled as touch or pressure, temperature (warm or cold), pain (including itch and tickle) and those that belong to proprioception. These are the sensations of muscle movement and joint position including posture, movement, visceral (internal) senses and facial expression. Visceral senses have to do with sensory information from within the body, such as stomach aches.
Touch may be considered one of five human senses; however, when a person touches something or somebody this gives rise to various feelings: the perception of pressure (shape, softness, texture, vibration, etc.), relative temperature and sometimes pain. Thus the term "touch" is actually the combined term for several senses. In medicine, the colloquial term "touch" is usually replaced with somatic senses, to better reflect the variety of mechanisms involved.
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Images for kids
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Touch is a crucial means of receiving information. This photo shows tactile markings identifying stairs for visually impaired people.
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This diagram linearly (unless otherwise mentioned) tracks the projections of all known structures that allow for touch to their relevant endpoints in the human brain.
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Gray's Anatomy, figure 759: the sensory tract, showing the pathway (blue) up the spinal cord, through the somatosensory thalamus, to S1 (Brodmann areas 3, 1, and 2), S2, and BA7
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Gray's Anatomy, figure 717: detail showing path adjacent to the insular cortex (marked insula in this figure), adjacent to S1, S2, and BA7
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The cortical homunculus, a map of somatosensory areas of the brain, was devised by Wilder Penfield.
See also
In Spanish: Sistema somatosensorial para niños
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 | Wilma Rudolph |
 | Jesse Owens |
 | Jackie Joyner-Kersee |
 | Major Taylor |
