Meissner corpuscle · Lobeworks/17

The Meissner corpuscle is a sensory receptor that detects movement across the skin, a mechanoreceptor made of a coiled nerve ending packed into the ridges just under the surface of the fingertips, lips and palms, which fires while something moves across the skin and goes quiet as soon as it stops.

Meissner corpuscle. The Meissner corpuscle is a sensory receptor that detects movement across the skin, a mechanoreceptor made of a coiled nerve ending packed into the ridges just under the surface of the fingertips, lips and palms, which fires while something moves across the skin and goes quiet as soon as it stops.

It is rapidly adapting like the Pacinian corpuscle, but close to the surface, small and dense, so its message is local and tuned to slower movement: flutter of a few tens of hertz rather than the Pacinian's hundreds, and the minute slips of an object starting to slide in the grip.

It keeps the glass from falling. When a held glass begins to slip, rapidly adapting endings fire and the grip tightens before anything is noticed, a correction run largely below awareness.

Small fields, many of them. Dense in the fingertips, each reports a patch a few millimetres across, which is part of why the fingertips resolve so finely.

Hairless skin only. On hairy skin the endings wrapped around hair follicles take over the job of signalling movement.

Meissner says something is sliding; it never says how hard it presses.

Pressure held still is left to the Merkel discs.

Questions: Why do you stop feeling a shirt a minute after putting it on? Because most of what reports it only reports change. While the cloth slides over the skin, the rapidly adapting Meissner endings near the surface fire hard; once it rests they fall nearly silent although it still touches you. The slowly adapting endings keep a faint report of the pressure, and attention filters out most of what is left, so the shirt returns only when it moves again.