The Touch Museum
How your skin becomes a sense organ — from Meissner corpuscles to the Taptic Engine. Explore the cortical homunculus, translate Braille, test your two-point discrimination, and trace 2,500 years of figuring out the most fundamental sense.
Click any body part to see its touch stats — receptor density, two-point threshold, and cortical representation.
Gallery
40 artifacts across anatomy, Braille, thermal and pain, haptic technology, and animal touch systems. Click any card to copy its description.
No artifacts in this category.
Timeline
From 335 BC to 2021 — 2,300 years of figuring out how the skin feels.
Playground
Hands-on demonstrations of Braille encoding, two-point discrimination thresholds, and how temperature receptors mistake chili and mint for hot and cold.
Type in the top box to see each letter rendered as a 6-dot Braille cell. Each cell is a 2×3 grid: dots 1–3 on the left column (top to bottom), dots 4–6 on the right.
The smallest separation at which two simultaneous skin touches still feel like two instead of one. Pick a body part and see the threshold to scale — if the gap looks small, you have tight resolution there.
TRP ion channels encode temperature and chemical irritants. TRPV1 fires for heat above 43 °C or for capsaicin. TRPM8 fires for cold below 25 °C or for menthol. Drag the sliders and see which channels open.