ABSTRACT
The cutaneous senses provide the brain with information from a range of multimodal sensory receptors and nerves in the skin and comprise the four main submodalities of touch, temperature, itch and pain. The concentration on the hand with researches into touch has led to relatively few studies of tactile sensitivity being carried out on hairy skin. Sensations from the skin, encoded in peripheral nerves as spike activity, enter the central nervous system via the dorsal half of the spinal cord and form nerve fibre bundles that ascend to the top of the spinal cord. Behavioural and neuroimaging studies are addressing these issues and there is increasing evidence for a different central neural representation to stroking either glabrous or hairy skin that can help explain behavioural aspects of touch and touching. A dual role for touch serving both a discriminative and an affective role in human behaviour has been described.
