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Touch is probably our most underrated sense," said psychologist Martin Arvidsson of Stockhom University in Sweden, whose research team has found that humans can perceive even smaller changes in surfaces than previously believed."
In a study published in today's Scientific Reports, the researchers report that humans can perceive miniscule changes in surfaces—down to a microscopic 13 nanometers, about the width of a human hair.
When your finger rubs against another surface, tiny pressure sensors embedded within your fingers, called Pacinian corpuscles, perceive the texture.
These sensors also pick up vibrations, and the closer the vibrations are formed to these sensor areas, the stronger their sensitivity.
Vibrations felt by these pressure sensors add up to particular frequencies that the brain translates into our surprisingly fine sense of touch.
