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Homunculus

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Lab 6: Build Your Own Homunculus

Jennifer Roytbak

Animal Physiology Lab – PCB4723L

Tuesday – 8:00AM Section – 006

February 18th, 2014

Results (cont.)

In Figure 1 you can see that the most sensitive spots on both the right and the left side were my lips, tongue, and all my fingers. All had a density of 1 (1/mm) for both sides. The least sensitive spots for both the right and left side were my upper arm, back, and abdomen. The biggest difference for one body part between the right and the left side was my chin. The right side of my chin had a density of .33 mm and my left side had a density of .5 mm.

Discussion

The human body contains many different sensory receptors on our skin. The purpose of this lab was to determine the density of our own individual touch receptors in different parts of our body. Touch is the most sensitive and arguably the most important of our five senses. Unlike other sensory receptors, such as, smell, taste and sight, touch receptors are found throughout our bodies in different skin and muscle tissues and communicate all through our spinal cord (Angier, 2008).
We compared our right side to our left side. Looking at fig. 1 you can see the big differences in density from body part to body part. In some cases, such as the chin, neck, elbow, and palm you can see differences between the right and left side too. For the most part, both sides were pretty even though. My forehead, lips, tongue, lower arm, back of hand, thumb, index fingertip, middle finger, ring finger, little finger, and heel were all exactly the same on both sides of my body. All other parts not mentioned were very similar; this again can be seen in fig. 1. The reason why my fingers and lips were the most sensitive, and why they are usually the most sensitive for people in general is because those areas of your body have the most amount of nerve endings in them (Culberson, 2002). These nerve endings are specifically found in the tips of your fingers. We measured our sensitivity by measuring our receptor fields in centimeters and converting centimeters into millimeters. Our lips have some of the smallest receptor fields, which are around 2 to 3 millimeters small, while in other parts of our body average size of these receptor fields is around 0.014 to 0.025 millimeters (Culberson, 2002). This helps us understand why our lips are also more sensitive than other body parts. Homunculus, which also means “little man”, looks a lot different when compared to an actual human body. If I were to draw a model of a person and exaggerate the parts of your body that are more sensitive than it would look like a very small person with a very large mouth and very large hands (Angier, 2008). That would only happy if your body grew according to how much area of the cortex in your brain that particular body part was connected to. Just like everything else our homunculus evolves over time and our sensory system changes to adapt to our environment and our surroundings. When a sensory system brings in information that is not very useful and doesn’t have much of an effect, if any effect even still exists, than it will start to disappear over time and will be lost by being inactivated by the associated gene sequence (Julius and Nathans, 2012). Touch receptors can be the same and completely different in different types of animals.
For example, rattlesnakes have developed a very thin tissue across their pit that is so sensitive it has a TPR channel that can sense an increase in temperature that comes from a warm-blooded animal near the rattlesnake (Julius and Nathans, 2012). In fact, it is so sensitive it has been recorded at detecting the tiniest temperature change of 0.001o C (Julius and Nathans, 2012). This lab was overall a success and we recorded all the necessary data with minimal error. The only thing I can see to be a very slight problem was that our caliper was a little flimsy and some of our measurements might have been off by a centimeter.

References

Angier, N. (2008) The human touch; when it comes to detecting the truly tine, our sense of touch puts eyesight to shame. The Gazette, A.17.

Culberson, J. (2002) Touch. Biology. Ed., 4:161-62.

Julius, D. and Nathans, J. (2012) Signaling by sensory receptors. Cold Spring Harb
Perspect Biol., 4:1.

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