As the human skin is pretty large how the brain accurately map the source of injury or touch and how does it make the pain or the feeling appear from that particular place?
In: Biology
Each part of our body actually is mapped to certain regions within the somatosensory cortex (a slice near the middle of the brain). It’s just the result of a bunch of nerve endings within our dermis / throughout the body in general.
Highly recommend looking up a brain homunculus. They map out what parts of the cortex correspond to what parts of your body. It’s very interesting and makes a lot of sense seeing how something like your hands take up a larger percentage of the cortical area compared to something like your trunk.
The human brain is *really* good at telling where stuff is on certain parts of your body, and *really* bad at others.
Since there are a lot of individual nerves on your hand and fingers, you can usually pinpoint exactly where the injury is.
Since there are much less nerves on your back, you could kind of tell the general area of where it is, but the brain doesn’t really care.
The body can tell which nerve is sending the pain signal, it’s just a matter of whether or not you have a lot of nerves there that decides the accuracy of that knowledge.
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