Our Senses: Touch, From Single Cell To Whiskers

OUR SENSES: TOUCH, FROM SINGLE CELL TO WHISKERS
Published November 15, 2017

[The Museum's logo animates out.]

[An animated planet rotates in space.]

[MUSIC PLAYS]

ROB DESALLE (Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): Probably the first sense that any organism on this planet evolved was a sense of touch.

[POP]

[An oversized finger comes in from the side, and pushes the planet off-screen.]

DESALLE: Or a sense of pressure on a cell.

[SQUISHING, WATERY SOUNDS]

[A circle widens out to reveal animated single-celled organisms moving slowly.]

DESALLE: Now, of course, single cells don't have nervous systems. But they need to know when something's coming into contact with them.

[Two cells bump into one another. One retracts and moves swiftly in the other direction.]

[Curator Rob DeSalle speaks in his office. On-screen text gives his title as "Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology]

DESALLE: The sense of touch is a very important one for how we deal with the environment.

[An animated brain hangs from a pulley system. It moves downwards, tugging the rope along with it.]

DESALLE: One of the larger parts of our sensory cortex...

[Wider view of room where a Rube Goldberg machine is animated out—as the brain moves down, a rope and pulleys lift a wooden board, tipping off a weight, thus releasing the pendulum of a clock. Attached to the pendulum arm is a hand that moves back and forth with the movement, petting a purring cat that sits at the end of a mantelpiece.]

DESALLE: ...in your brain is connected to your fingers and to your hands.

[Close up of hand scratching cat's back.]

[PURRING]

DESALLE: The fine tuning of touch with our fingers perhaps made us kind of a unique species on this planet.

[Close up of cat's face, first eyes closed, then open with surprise.]

[MEOW]

[Animated receptors of various sizes, shapes and colors bounce slightly on springs.]

[BOING]

DESALLE: We have this menagerie of touch cells—

[Close up of a feather moving across a construction paper "cell."]

[TWINKLING SOUND]

DESALLE: ...different receptors that detect different kinds of pressure from the outside.

[Close up of a hammer banging onto a construction paper "cell."]

[BANG]

[The camera moves through a forest of animated cells, stretching and moving subtly.]

DESALLE: And one of my favorites is the Merkel cells that are disc-shaped neural cells in your skin...

[The scene whirls into an image of a fingerprint.]

DESALLE: ...that can detect very, very minute, miniscule changes in the surface of something.

[The fingerprint is pushed down, out of the frame. Two animated green hills appear. A large animated finger moves across them, and text appears indicating that the finger is able to differentiate a difference in 13 nanometers in height.]

[Finger pulls out of frame. Several animals animate in succession, stacked on top of one another—a donkey, a dog, a cat, a rooster, and a mouse.]

DESALLE: Other organisms have these touch cells and the classic example of this are whiskers.

[An animated, overhead view of a mouse's face, whiskers twitching.]

DESALLE: Each have a Merkel cell, and when they get slightly moved...

[The mouse moves forward and comes into contact with a piece of cheese.]

DESALLE: ...that's putting pressure on the Merkel cell...

[A brain appears overlaying the mouse's head. Dotted lines animate from the whiskers to the brain.]

DESALLE: ...and then that's sending a message to the brain saying....

[The shot widens out to reveal that the cheese sits on a mousetrap. The mouse sniffs at the cheese, whiskers twitching.]

DESALLE: ... "Oh, there's something really close to your face."

[MOUSE SQUEAKS]

[Mouse runs away from the baited trap.]

[MUSIC PLAYS]

[Card appears saying: "American Museum of Natural History, Our Senses: An Immersive Experience, Opens November 2017. Our Senses is generously supported by Dana and Virginia Randt."]

[Credits roll.]