I’ve had hemorrhoids for like 25 years, so I’ve always been very discerning about my toilet paper.
this entire time, I’ve been using whatever toilet paper I have found to be the softest as facial tissue, to blow my nose, as well. my reasoning being, if this stuff is gentle enough for my hemorrhoids, of course it’s going to be gentle enough for repeated use on my upper lip.
then, a friend turns me on to one of those new “with lotion” facial tissues (my bathroom tissue always has aloe in it) and wouldn’t you know it, my upper lip finds it to be softer than the toilet paper. but, when I try using it as toilet paper, my anus doesn’t find it to be less irritating than the toilet paper.
why do my butthole and my upper lip think that different things are softer? is it just chemistry?
Dammit, yet another question that I spent too much of my life on.
It comes down to nerves and tissue (cell, not paper) types.
The outside of your nose and the tissues of the anus are not the exact same. There’s a different concentration of “nerve endings”, and different types in different concentrations.
I doubt you want the full Monty of it, but if you look up the term “sensory receptors”, you can do the deep dive very easily.
The short version is that we have specific types of “nerve endings” (that’s what they’re called colloquially, hence the quote marks, but I’ll stop using those at this point). They detect pressure, temperature, pain/injury, etc.
The concentrations of them (as in how many per square inch), and the assortment of them (as in how many of each type in that square inch) varies across the entire body. The easiest way to demonstrate the relative principle is to touch your fingertip to your nose, your lips, your genitals (seriously), and your leg.
You’ll find that your brain interprets the signals in an interesting way. It’ll filter the less intense signals. You touch your finger to your lip, what your brain “says” is that your lips are being touched by something, and the signal from your finger takes the back seat. You touch the same fingertip to your thigh your brain says the finger is the primary sensation, and you feel the thigh via the finger rather than the finger via the thigh the way the lips worked.
Give it a try on whatever parts of your body you want. There’s going to be a shifting perception of whether it’s your finger touching something ( where emphasis is placed on the signals from the finger), or it’ll be the section of the body being touched by the finger (signal from the touched location being emphasized).
The anus and the nose have different jobs. The anus, mostly, needs to detect pressure, injury, and some degree of chemical contact the nose needs less pressure sensitivity, but more motion sensitivity. So you’ll get a different overall sensation with any given substance that’s pushed against either, and when the same substance is moved across either. The difference may end up being minor. But both are sensitive enough that most people can tell a difference between paper tissue products blindfolded.
Back in the day, I wiped asses for pay. The only patients I had that couldn’t tell the difference between brands of TP had medical issues that interfered with nerve signals. Do a test for yourself. Find a buddy to hand you tp or facial tissues and keep a log (heh, he said log while talking about butts). There’s a very good chance that every single one will feel different. You’ll probably be able to tell which brand is which if you’ve used that brand before.
You can probably even tell the difference with your fingers tbh. But you wouldn’t likely be able to if the same products were placed or rubbed on your back
You’d also notice that different objects will feel different when just placed on an area and pressed gently into the skin vs when you wipe the area with it.
Skin is an amazing thing. It’s armor, a sensor array, a biological filter, sunscreen, and a temperature regulator all in one! Plus other functions tbh, but shit like that gets overwhelming to read for a lot of people
You’d be amazed what you can discover with just an hour sitting around and touching things to parts of your body.
This was wild to experience. Thank you for the interactive educational lesson.
If Lemmy had a c/bestof, I’d be cross-posting. Thank you southsamurai!
You’re in luck, there is a best of Lemmy!
Oh my god! I’m sitting here touching myself like a fucking madwoman. Thank you so much! Brilliant, brilliant comment. I had no idea, how have I lived without this knowledge? Ok I’m touching myself again, this is hilarious.
Best response ever :)
Thanks for taking the time to write this.
Posts like this prove to me that Lemmy is ready to replace Reddit. Probably not completely true for everyone, and every topic, but we’re getting there.
hey cool. thanks
No worries ::
This is an amazing comment! TIL, sciencey comments like these are what I most miss from reddit.
Thank you posting such an in depth and interesting explanation!
Glad to :)
What does it mean if the sensation always seems to be “my finger is touching” vs “I’m being touched by a finger”? I feel like I completely understand what you’re getting at and it’s something I’ve never thought about before so I’m touching myself all over but everything feels like it’s being touched by my finger. I haven’t found a spot that feels like my finger is touching it yet and I really want to.
Well, barring some form of medical issue, chances are that you’ve run into the mind-body connection.
It’s entirely possible to override the filtering the brain does. You can decide to pay attention to the signals from your finger more, and your brain will usually obey.
And it is possible that either your fingers are extra sensitive, or that the places you’re touching are atypically low in comparison to your fingers.
Generally, the two most sensitive spots on the body are the lips and the genitals. But there’s stuff that can interfere with that isn’t abnormal or a problem, but still shift the way the brain processes the signals coming in.
I’d try dimming lights, or even cutting them off, and very gently, with only enough pressure to make contact, move a fingertip, usually the index finger, across your lips. You can also try treating your finger like a lollipop, and wrap your lips around the tip to gently kiss. That gives greater area of contact, which will help if the issue is something like thicker skin on the lips.
And, at the risk of seeming weird, gently touching the glans penis (the head) or clitoris almost always works as the nerve density there is as high as it gets.
For me, my entire face feels the finger, but once I get past the chin or into the scalp, it shifts. Some people only have the lips, nose and sometimes eyes that are more sensitive than the fingers.
If we’re already taking about genitals, maybe I can ask if you know anything about the nerve endings in nipples? Two specific questions: first, touching them feels great to some people and awful to others. Why? Second, for someone to whom it feels good, the sensation is still really weird: it’s almost like there’s a ton of nerve endings but they’re not site specific. It’s not at all like poking yourself in the leg.
Nipples are definitely high on the touch scale. A little lower regarding motion, but very pressure sensitivity, and only slightly than pressure with temperature. That’s pulling from memory, but I’m fairly confident about my memory on the subject because it hasn’t been long since I had to refresh on things.
As to why someone might or might not enjoy nipple play, that’s complex. All of our perception via skin senses is a mix of the various nerve ending types, the thickness of the skin at any given spot, the brain’s filters, psychological filters/associations, and mind frame in the moment.
Even if you ignore sexual arousal and sexual intent, we tend to think of nipples as something “special” in comparison to, say, the knee. So our minds set us up to some degree or another to process the sensations at the nipple in a fairly unique way. Since they’re “bigger” than their actual size, everything from them is going to take up more room in the brain, the same way lips and such do.
That, btw, is about how much of the brain is dedicated to processing the signals from an area. I can’t find one right now, but there’s images of what our bodies would look like if they were sized in proportion to how much the brain devotes to the area. I’m running on empty right now, but I’ll try to find one once I’ve had some sleep.
Back to the nipples though. Because of the job they do, high sensitivity is necessary. Remember, even the nipples on men are still the same basic equipment, so they follow the same resource devotion as women’s do. They’re all evolved with baby feeding as being a survival trait.
But the system isn’t perfect. Sometimes, some aspect of the link between the nipples and the brain skew too far into sensitivity, and you run across the folks where just having soft fabric rub them can be outright painful. But the exact reason can vary based on any of the factors I mentioned earlier. It can be an unusually high proportion of pain receptors, it could be the brain filtering the signals weird, it could even be psychological rather than neurological or anatomical. But it comes down to the signals being individualized.
As an example, I deal with chronic pain. I’ve learned how to ignore some sensations that were enough to have me contemplating suicide when it all started. So, for me, it takes a higher level of intensity for my nipples to be perceived as painful, even when someone is practically chewing on them (or literally is, the lady I dated before I met my wife was intense lol). But, back before the chronic pain stuff, I had a much lower threshold where pulling and biting would become unpleasant. Learning how to compartmentalize pain in general, which is a combination of meditative and psychological practice, means that even though the signals of my nipple being bitten is exactly the same as before, the way my brain prioritizes and filters those signals changed.
I wish there was a simpler, more direct answer than it being a dozen individual factors, but that’s what it is.
As far as why the perception is weird compared to other parts of the body, it is the nerve density and the thinness of the tissue of the areolae and nipples. They’re set up so that feeding babies isn’t overwhelming (as a baseline, because that can be way overwhelming for some people), but there’s acute sensitivity for the process of feeding. They’re also linked into the same involuntary nervous system that governs arousal (and orgasm!), so we tend to place a different weight on them when it comes to the brain and the mind. Nipples and areolae really are pretty unique compared to the majority of our skin surface. The lips are the most similar iirc, with parts of the genitals being close as well.
I’d have to go digging to find the rough proportions for the various sections of the body because it wasn’t a factor in what I was looking for when I first ran across the subject as a whole. But every section does have a different proportion of the various nerve ending types, and different densities of them. But they also link to other sections of the nervous system differently, which means the link to the brain for a given section is going to vary wildly across the body.
We are marvels of evolution. Our reduced hair presence gives us a lot of extra sensory data, and we’ve got brains matched to be able to process the millions of signals from all of that every split second. With nothing but the little nerve endings connected to the short and thin (relative to other mammals), we can detect a breeze so faint as to not visibly move hairs. How fucking cool is that? We can pick up differences in temperature down to a few degrees. We can accurately detect pressure down to about a half PSI on our fingertips, sometimes even less.
A lot of what we learn about how we compare to other animals glosses over exactly how sensitive our skin can be. And, more importantly, how powerful our brains are to be able to process all of it.
The nipples are a perfect example of that. Did you know that some people can read Braille with their nipples? No bullshit, I used to date a blind lady that would do it as a party trick. She said she knew a guy that could do it with the tip of his penis too, though she may have been trolling me. Which is way tangential to what you asked, but I think it illustrates exactly how unique the configuration of the nipples is compared to other parts of the body.
I think I might have gotten into my own head with it when I first noticed what you meant when I touched my lips. I touched my genitals after and then went to my thighs. My lips and genitals I can clearly feel that they are being touched by my finger and I don’t feel it through my finger. So I started poking my thighs, chest, back, feet, etc and it kept feeling the same but I think I was pushing too hard or had the experiment in my head too much. After reading this post I can feel the difference testing my lips vs my forehead and from there I seem to weirdly be able to tell my brain is influencing wether I feel the sensation through my thigh or my finger if I do that next. If I go from my lips to my thigh I feel it in my thigh, if I go from my forehead to my thigh I feel both through my finger. It’s like my brain is screwing with me/itself because it knows what I’m doing. I bet if I was less focused on what I’m trying to experiment with that I could do it in a more decoupled way. Such a small but cool bit about myself that I had no idea was a thing. Thank you for explaining and walking me through the process.
Edit: I think I reversed the sensation direction in my first response, my only excuse is that this is kind of wild and new territory for me so I think I struggle communication the different sensations that I never even realized I was capable of until now. Your explanation and guidance was still right on though. Thank you
I’m glad you had fun with it :)
I never cease to be amazed at the way we can shift our perceptions like that.
Eligible for best of lemmy