1. Tenley Rasch Emily Smith Stephanie McHenry

2.  Pressure  Warmth  Cold  Pain

3.  Cold : “I stuck my tongue to a frozen stop sign!”  Warmth: “Don’t touch the hot pizza, no matter how good it looks!”  Pressure: “How can that guy have pins stuck into his back?!”  Pain: “I stubbed my toe on the bed railing!”

4. TThe area at the front of the parietal lobes that registers and processes body touch and movement sensations

5.  Pain is your body’s way of telling you something has gone wrong  Pain is an unpleasant sensation often caused by intense or damaging stimuli such as stubbing a toe, burning a finger, putting iodine on a cut, and bumping the "funny bone.“

7.  Congenital Analgesia: usually die by early adulthood  Without discomfort that makes us switch positions, joints fail from excess strain, and without warning of pain, infections and injuries accumulate  Hyperalgesia: extreme sensitivity to something that others would find only mildly painful

8.  Only pressure has identifiable receptors  Some spots on our body are especially sensitive to pressure  Stroking adjacent pressure spots creates a tickle

9.  500,000 sensory receptors that detect pressure are located in the skin.  Mechano-receptors travel from the skin to the somatosensory areas in the frontal and parietal lobes.  Women are significantly more sensitive to touch than men. (Not very shocking.)

10.  Some 7 in 10 amputees may feel movement in nonexistent limbs  The brain comes prepared with to anticipate the fact that that it will be getting information from a body that has limbs

11.  The theory that the spinal cord contains a neurological “gate” that blocks pain signals or allows them to pass on into the brain. The “gate” is opened by the activity of pain signals traveling up small nerve fibers and is closed by activity in large fibers or by information coming from the brain.

12.  Spinal cord contains small nerve fibers that conduct most pain signals  It also contains larger fibers that conduct most other sensory signals  When tissue is injured small nerve fibers activate and open the neural gate  Large fiber activity shuts that gate  Thus if you stimulate gate closing activity by massage electrical signal or acupuncture you can disrupt the pain message.  The brain can close this gate too!

13.  A method of childbirth that combines relaxation(through deep breathing and muscle relaxation), counterstimulation (through gentle massage), and distraction (through focusing attention on, say, a nice photo). An effective way to increase pain tolerance.

14.  An alternative medicine that treats patients by insertion and manipulation of needles in the body.