This might be a rather odd example, but when I’m peeing, I can pinpoint the EXACT location I feel my pee actually leaving my tip, if that makes sense. How come I can’t feel my bladder, or the stream going through the tube, thanks.
In: Biology
I’ve had one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cystoscopy.
It was a topical anesthetic but I could feel the camera going in. It wasn’t the sensation of touch, but of pressure.
I’m guessing we have minimal to no sensory nerves for our insides, a consequence of possible evolutionary needs to focus on impulses from the outside environment compared to internal processes that are repetitive in nature.
That would be a lot of sensations happening all the time.
Better to just send signals when something is not operating normally (pain/discomfort)
When I had a stent removed from my L ureter, I __definitely__ felt it moving through the ureter and into the bladder. It was a one-time thing. Next time I felt anything like that was the first time I stood after my gall bladder was removed; things moved around a bit and then settled in new places.
[removed]
Your brain is capable of an immense amount of multitasking, but it still has its limits. The amount of sensory information coming from outside the body is already forcing your body to prioritize what’s important vs not. As mentioned by others, a lot of it is driven by how important it is for survival. Being able sense external things, like pain when cut, bad smells, or something dangerous coming into your field of view, is a lot more important than being able to feel your insides *unless there is an obvious cause for concern*. If your brain has to process and express every sensation, just existing will probably be difficult.
You kind of can. Touch is mostly reserved for your outside where you’ll use it the most but if something does get inside you have some but few touch sensors to feel it. Just enough to know something is wrong. If you push on an inny belly button it feels in the wrong place because it’s far enough on your insides your brain doesn’t know what to think.
The answers you’ve gotten don’t really get at what’s actually going on. As far as the nerves controlling your body and feeling sensations, you have have two different nervous systems. The nerves controlling the ‘outside’ of your body (like controlling your muscles and feeling things touching your skin), you have the somatic nervous system. For things on the ‘inside’ (like your organs), you have the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is largely unconscious. You can’t consciously move your intestines like you can move you arm. You can feel things sometimes from your autonomous nervous system, but it sucks at feeling exactly where something is coming from exactly. So, you get a stomach ache that feels kind of all over in your belly, but you can’t tell exactly where. Or, for your question, you can tell that you need to pee. But when you do pee, you can’t feel exactly where the sensation of peeing comes from
This is tangential – and maybe someone more knowledgeable can answer this too – but the first and only time I tried a gummy with THC in it I could feel all of my internal organs squishing and rubbing against each other. Horrible sensory overload feeling and not something I would want to experience on a regular basis. The brain in normal function not under the influence of anything probably limits that sensory input unless there is a problem in which case you would feel pain in the organ that has damage or inflammation.
Actually if you have arthritis sometimes you do feel your insides!! We have skeletal muscles covering everything in there including organs. Lots of people with arthritis think that something is terribly wrong with their organs
Actual ELI5 TL;DR: We can, but not equally for all organs, usually only when things are changing or going wrong, and it’s harder to tell where sensations are coming from because the nerve endings are more spread out + we can’t see exactly where things move inside us.
There are a few questions/assumptions wrapped into this question:
1. Can we consciously sense internal stimuli?
2. How specifically can we localise or feel where exactly sensations come from?
3. How does this work for the genitourinary system, like your example?
Broad answers:
1. Yes! This is called ‘interoception’, the sensations inside us. More specifically, a type of interoception is ‘visceroception’ or feeling our visceral organs (e.g. heart, lungs, kidneys, GI tract, etc.). You won’t feel the brain at all as it doesn’t have sensory nerves (even though it’s the source and destination of most sensory nerves from elsewhere).
As others mentioned, sensations are based on change in stimuli, and our brain’s interpretation of what’s going on and how relevant that is (notice the sensations of sitting in your chair or your tongue in your mouth and it literally feels different than when you’re not attending to it). So change and relevance matter, meaning most unchanging and irrelevant sensations are filtered out to minimal, vague perceptions that are only relevant when things are going wrong, causing discomfort or pain.
2. Localising sensory signals is a practiced skill based on sensory feedback and integrating many senses. When you feel something in a specific place, it’s based on a combination of how tightly packed the sensory nerve endings are in that area (most sensitive around lips, genitals, fingers; least across areas like the back and legs) and how much we can use feedback from the world or other senses to check. Internal sensors vary but are generally a lot more diffuse.
3. Based on the above, a body-temperature stream of smoothly flowing urine does not create much physical stimulation and little sensation change, plus we can’t see it, so our brain’s don’t have the feedback to learn where specific sensations are coming from. When it reaches the end of the urethra and exits the body, there’s more changing stimuli, more sensory nerves, and we can see it so it’s a much more specific localised sensation.
Latest Answers