Fine Touch and Crude Touch
Fine touch, (or discriminative touch), is a sensory modality which allows a subject to sense and localise touch. The form of touch where localisation is not possible is known as crude touch. The posterior column-medial lemniscus pathway is the pathway responsible for the sending of fine touch information to the cerebral cortex of the brain.
Crude touch (or non-discriminative touch) is a sensory modality which allows the subject to sense that something has touched them, without being able to localize where they were touched (contrasting "fine touch"). Its fibres are carried in the spinothalamic tract. Unlike the fine touch which is carried in the dorsal column
As fine touch normally works in parallel to crude touch, a person will be able to localize touch until fibres carrying fine touch (Posterior column-medial lemniscus pathway) have been disrupted. Then the subject will feel the touch, but be unable to identify where they were touched.
Read more about this topic: Somatosensory System
Famous quotes containing the words fine, touch and/or crude:
“I can’t make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“We mustn’t touch them yet, but see and see!
And what was green would by and by be gold.
Their name was called the Gold Hesperidee.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)