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.
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Famous quotes containing the words fine, touch and/or crude:
“As to honour—you know—it’s a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn’t theirs.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“A refined soul is distressed to know that someone owes it thanks; a crude soul, to know that it owes someone thanks.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)