SKIN SENSES (Cutaneous Sense)

The senses of warmth, cold, pain, and touch (pressure) located in the skin.Skin sensations are the source of relatively simple experiences such as itching and tingling, pain due to injury, and feelings of hot and cold. Though they often play a crucial role in our lives, we depend far less on them than on sight and hearing for our knowledge of the external world. However, one of these senses, the sense of touch, is more closely related to perception than the others, since we can often identify objects by the way they feel. This ability would be greatly increased if we had to rely more completely on this sense mechanism, as is the case with the blind.The sensations of touch, pain, warmth, and cold are experienced through four distinct kinds of sensitive spots on the skin surface. They are not evenly distributed and therefore a given area of the skin will not respond with every type of sensation when appropriately stimulated. This selective functioning is termed “punctate sensitivity.” On most parts of the skin pain spots are most thickly distributed, then touch, cold and warmth spots in that order.