Touch and The Dorsal Column System


Throughout our lives we have used our sense of touch to perceive the environment around us. But, how does our body exactly interpret skin stimulation? Humans have several skin receptors that enable us to detect various stimuli, which in turn send signals to the brain. Although there are a few skin receptors that have been studied over the years, the Meissner corpuscle and it’s ability to perceive form will be looked at in this storyboard. Let’s take a look at how this touch receptor works:

First, a Meissner corpuscle, which has a relatively large receptive field, detects stimulation along the skin and sends action potentials along the axons of a cutaneous nerve. These axons, which belong to unipolar neurons, enter the dorsal roots of the spinal cord and travel to the spinal column dorsal horn. The axons now travel along side the spinal cord’s dorsal column of white matter and move upwards toward the brain. Moving up to the brainstem, an axon synapses on a neuron of the dorsal column nuclei in the medulla here. If you really want to dig in deep, we can see the dorsal column nuclei magnified here. This neuron’s axon then crosses the midline and travels to nuclei in the thalamus. Finally, the left thalamus receives the information from the periphery and sends the received information to the somatosensory cortex.


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