An experiment to determine how sensitive different areas of the skin is.

Since certain areas of the skin have a greater concentration of sense organs than others, I have chosen to do my experiment on specific parts of the body. One of the main areas I have decided to conduct my experiment is on the fingertips. Since they have a large number of touch organs, they will be particularly sensitive to touch (we are aware of this sensation because a nerve impulse is sent to the brain when the nerve endings receive a stimulus). Other testing areas I have chosen include the back of the hand, the back of the neck and the cheek.

HOW THE EXPERIMENT WILL BE CONDUCTED:

My volunteer will be asked to sit down and will be blind folded. I will measure out the distance between the two pencils using a cm ruler. The pencils in my first test will be taken 5cm apart. She will first be tested on her fingertips and I will change the distance between the pencils, continuingly closing the gap between the pencils until she feels only one point instead of two distinct points. With this, I will record the distance. Four readings will be taken for each body part to make it a reliable result. The main safety precaution throughout this experiment will be to make sure I press the pencils lightly, as this could be very dangerous for my volunteer. I will have to make sure that both pencils touch the skin at the same time.                                                                                                                                                                          I will repeat this experiment to find the skin’s sensitivity to touch on the back of the hand, the back of the neck, the cheek, as well as the fingertips. We will also swap places in order to compare the results.  

RESULTS:                                                                                                                               Here is a table of my results:

My experiment above shows that different parts of the body have different abilities to feel things touching the skin. As you can see from the results above, the most sensitive skin is at the fingertips, since my volunteer was able to feel all the pencil points (the smaller the gap between the points which she was able to detect, was where the more sensitive skin was). The experiment showed that there are more touch receptors in the skin at the fingertip area.