Neuroscience

How the brain encodes warm and cool

Researchers from the Max Delbrück Center have found a region of the brain that is responsible for our perception of temperature when we touch things. The paper, which appears in Nature, reports the discovery of a "thermal ...

Neuroscience

Treating gut pain via a Nobel prize-winning receptor

Targeting a receptor responsible for our sense of touch and temperature, which researchers have now found to be present in our colon, could provide a new avenue for treating chronic pain associated with gastrointestinal disorders ...

Surgery

Silencing gut pain without pain killers

Surgically removing specific populations of sensory nerves that communicate between internal organs, such as the bladder and gut, and the brain, can silence pain responses, without impacting other functions in the body, new ...

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Sensory system

A sensory system is a part of the nervous system responsible for processing sensory information. A sensory system consists of sensory receptors, neural pathways, and parts of the brain involved in sensory perception. Commonly recognized sensory systems are those for vision, hearing, somatic sensation (touch), taste and olfaction (smell).

The receptive field is the specific part of the world to which a receptor organ and receptor cells respond. For instance, the part of the world an eye can see, is its receptive field; the light that each rod or cone can see, is its receptive field. Receptive fields have been identified for the visual system, auditory system and somatosensory system, so far.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA