> but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch
s/considered/named/ , if everything were called "touch" then we'd need new language to differentiate between stuff interacting with visible light, air pressure waves, etc. \
The other question is can the sense of "touch" be broken down further? And the answer is yes, there are distinct "sense of touch" systems that measure different kinds of movement (stretching, low frequency vibration, high frequency vibration, ...) and these are used in ways that may be surprising (e.g. feeling details of a surface is mediated more through vibrations than by "displacement/distance" type senses)
also for building practical intuition, they can be temporarily turned off via adaptation - i.e. hold on to something vibrating at 20Hz for a few minutes, now you've blown out the Meissner's Corpuscle / low freq system while retaining the others
Some intro material below
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system
- https://pressbooks.umn.edu/sensationandperception/chapter/mechanoreceptors-draft/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/mechanoreceptor
- chapters are on scihub: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4377-2411-0.00024-1
s/considered/named/ , if everything were called "touch" then we'd need new language to differentiate between stuff interacting with visible light, air pressure waves, etc. \
The other question is can the sense of "touch" be broken down further? And the answer is yes, there are distinct "sense of touch" systems that measure different kinds of movement (stretching, low frequency vibration, high frequency vibration, ...) and these are used in ways that may be surprising (e.g. feeling details of a surface is mediated more through vibrations than by "displacement/distance" type senses)
also for building practical intuition, they can be temporarily turned off via adaptation - i.e. hold on to something vibrating at 20Hz for a few minutes, now you've blown out the Meissner's Corpuscle / low freq system while retaining the others
Some intro material below