Scientists determine how body differentiates between a scorch and a scratch

You can tell without looking whether you've been stuck by a pin or burnt by a match. But how? In research that overturns conventional wisdom, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have shown that this sensory discrimination begins in the skin at the very earliest stages of neuronal information processing, with different populations of sensory neurons--called nociceptors--responding to different kinds of painful stimuli.

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