What do you think?

The sense of feeling is something we take for granted. The english phrase I just used does not quite convey the message I wanted to say, it isn't so much that we have a naive or fleeting view of the importance of touch or tactile senses, it's that we don't have a thorough philosophical and physiological knowledge of what tactile senses mean.

Of the many particles in the universe, occuring either singularly or in bulk very few of them (to current knowledge) are animated. Certainly the things they come into contact with are purely the result of involuntary adherences to physical law. Thus they are constrained to meet only a very tiny fraction of materials in this universe of the nearly infinite.

However, the natural sense of touch of a human or animal seeks to synthesize information about any particulate form the body comes into contact with. Even if the constitutent matter, being born from atoms primordial to this world, has never before contacted such materials. No remark in evolution could say that the inorganic and organic compounds have built a memory of all possible combinations of atoms into materials.

Indeed, it is not from a memory bank that unconscious nervous tissues responds to materials, a sabertooth tiger or any other ancient animal, would feel a computer just as we feel a computer, even though it was impossible for its nerves to memorize how to respond to a computer, having no such entity to build memory out of.

The same can be said of a wide variety of things, and the consistency of feeling to each human being - similar responses to physical phenomena - (electric shock, bee stings, fire) shows a remarkable and seemingly infinitely complex system. The nervous system.

How can the nervous system be built of such general stuff, such that anything new to it, anything foreign to its ancestry, can be synthesized into information so intimate and so revealing that it would not be an exaggeration to say that the things we feel are information that we most understand.

The end-bulbs of Krause were described by Henry Gray as being located in sensitive areas of the body, the conjunctiva of the eyes, the clitoris of the female and the penis of the male. They are termination points of nervous fibers, that is to say that medullated or grey nervous tissue follows a path through the body from the CNS and ends in connects into these bulbs. Indeed, from an anatomical viewpoint the same constitutent nerves white or medullated nervous fibers and grey or non medullated nervous fibers run along the human body and terminate in many different structures (one of them being the end-bulbs of Krause)

The other things they terminate into, exist in the muscles, the tendons, and various other human tissue. From the selective nature of how our feelings from touch are communicated to us, it would not be a stretch to say the origin of feelings comes from the qualities of the termination points.

That is to say, that obviously the end-bulbs of krause being located specifically in sexually sensitive organs is what makes these organs sexually sensitive. This feeling is unique to the structure of the end-bulb of Krause. If this statement is true, then it should follow that the qualities of other feelings namely soreness, heat, cold, pain, pleasure all come from the particular structures the nearby nerves are connected to. (The structures of the termination points)

What I've always wondered, was that if what I say is true, and that feelings can be reduced to a system of physical (chemical, biological, and physical) properties, then can we make some chemical or something that generates some reaction (in the nerves) that is similar in response to the real physical thing?

If someone for instance generated something similar to lactic acid and poured it on my arm, would my arm then feel sore? Even if I haven't lifted weights, if the physical manifestation of lifting weights is reproduced, will my nerves tell the difference? Will my arm feel sore?

Another thing that has confused me, and that is tickling.

What evolutionary purpose does tickling serve? What possible use could come from someone being able to render someone laughing? Apes to a diminished extent show a response to tickling, but for the most part no other animal has a significant physiological response.

I say significant, because tickling is a severe reaction in the nerves, if you have someone tickle you, you will notice your muscles tense to such an extent that would normally be seen under heavy weight lifting. The sensation is strong enough to immobilize a person, and it results in laughter.

But some people are not ticklish, they do not laugh and their efferent nerves do not tense their muscles upon being tickled. What possible quality are they lacking or what chemical do they have that makes it so their nerves are not susceptible?

For that matter, how does tickling work? How do fast movements along the surface of the skin produce such a strong response? And in fact it's not constrained to fast movements, slow movements, rubbing movements, and poking movements all produce the reaction. Indeed no movement at all can still illicit the nervous response from in vitro anticipation. (wiggling of fingers above skin surface)

Is it the energy in the frequency, the psychological response, the construction of the nerves, a combination of these things?

Laughter is healthy, but I think most people interpret tickling as painful, but then how can such a dichotomy exist? Laughter is something that should show happiness, and yet pain is the physiological response.

Tickling has social and physiological questions to it and it's one of the main mysterious of the human nervous system.