Research Question
What is the impact of the distribution of skin receptors in different areas of the body?
Or
How do skin receptors' distribution change in different areas of your body?
Background Research:
Our Skin is the barrier that protects and keeps our internal organs from the outside. It is composed of three different layers:
The Epidermis
The dermis
The Hypodermis
The Epidermis Is the topmost layer, with a main objective of not letting anything that is possibly dangerous from entering our body.
The Dermis is the second layer of skin. It is located below the Epidermis and contains our hair follicles (which sprout on the Epidermis).
The Hypodermis is the lowest and largest layer, containing fat and connective tissues.
The different types of sensory receptors through the skin allow us to sense contact. These receptors provide important information to the brain through sensory neurons. With this, the brain is able to analyze the temperature, pain and pressure of the object which had contact to the skin.
The largest touch sensors we have is the Pacinian Corpuscle or lamellar Corpuscle located on the lowest layer of skin - the hypodermis.
It responds to vibrations on the skin, allowing the sensory neurons (which originate in the spinal cord and stay at the bottom of
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They are the two most sensitive mechanoreceptors out of all 4, as they have to respond to small and quick vibrations. Merkel's disks are slowly adapting receptors that react to 10-15 Hz vibration, while meissner's corpuscles are rapidly adapting, they react from 20 to 50 Hz vibration. The biggest concentration of mechanoreceptors are on the ridges of the fingertips as lots of vibrations tend to happen daily in these locations. The more the number of mechanoreceptors, the easier it is for the brain to get a lot of information about the object we are having contact with and its