How do we feel the difference between a light breeze and a pinch?

To find out, Scientific American Custom Media, in partnership with the Cavley Prize,

sat down with Professor Ardom Potaputian.

He shared the Cavley Prize in neuroscience in 2020 for answering this basic question.

Ardom says, until recently, no one really understood how our sense of touch works.

Just decades ago, we figured out how we see and then how we smell and taste.

How we sense touch was a big mystery.

Why was touch so difficult to understand?

Ardom says, no one knew how the body turned a physical sensation, like a squeeze on your

arm, into a message that cells could understand.

I always compare this to a dark room that you don't know what's going on inside.

You need to find the door handle so that you can open the door, turn on some lights and

find out what's inside.

After a series of painstaking experiments, Ardom and his colleagues found that doorknob,

a special type of proteins they named the piezos.

And these are fascinating molecules that do one thing, and that is they let ions go

from outside the cell to inside the cell or vice versa.

The body has lots of these ion channels that open and close to pass messages to our cells,

but almost all of them move in response to some sort of chemical change.

What was different about the piezos was that they responded to physical pressure, known

it's seen anything like this before.

Once you have these proteins and ion channels, then lots of things are available to scientists

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