If you’ve accidentally plucked or accidentally damaged a nail, you’ve experienced the unique pain that occurs when something touches the skin under your nail.
The real question is, why are some areas of our body so much more sensitive than other parts of the body?
First, let’s take a closer look at the anatomy of the fingers and the physiological factors involved in this part of the body.
Our hands are very adept at practicing and developing motor skills. For example, we do not think about how we can do all these things while holding a pen and writing, picking up a glass and putting it there, or trying to pull an object. Because our hands and fingers allow them.
We perform these skills with 3 main nerves and 27 different bones that control our muscles.
There are 3 basic nerves in our hands: median, ulnar and radial. We can think of these nerves as a main pathway with thousands of branches and smaller sections of these branches.
Our fingertips are the region with the highest nerve ending density compared to all other parts of our body.
While this nerve ending density averages 2,500 per square centimeter, some of these nerve receptors greatly increase our sensitivity.
Nails are another structure that increases the functionality of our hands as well as our fingertips.
Nails can actually be expressed as a flattened claw that most mammals have. Claws, which fulfill the defense and basic needs of mammals, have undergone various evolutionary changes over time and their changing needs, turning into claws.
Fingernails, like claws, consist of a hard layer of keratin.
However, unlike the claws of animals, when the nails are dislodged or damaged, completely unprotected nerve endings emerge from underneath.
So, while our nails have a very hard structure, why is the area under the nail so sensitive?
Nerve endings are concentrated in certain parts of our body to increase sensitivity and functionality, just like our fingertips. The junction of the dense nerve endings and the hard preservative is therefore inevitably sensitive.
The nerves under our nails are rarely exposed to the external environment. The skin under the nails spends 99% of its existence covered with nails and protected from external factors.
Since our under-cut skin does not receive the stimuli of the outside world, such as our nail tips, it is unprepared for any external factor and is faced with a shocking pain in case of possible contact.
C-fibers cause our sense of touch in our fingertips to gain sensitivity.
We perceive and feel the texture or heat of an object we touch thanks to these fibers, but our under-nail tissues do not have any of these defense layers. Because nails already serve this task.
- Sources: Science ABC, Shape, Ask the Scientists
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