Reconfiguring Touch

Photo by Jackson David on Unsplash

Last week the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Ardem Patapoutian, a brilliant neuroscientist at Scripps Research in La Jolla. Patapoutian discovered the receptors that make us sense heat, cold, pain, and sound.

Dr. Patapoutian’s research on touch, however, has garnered the most media attention. The Lebanese immigrant discovered how uniquely different touch is from the other senses of vision, olfaction, taste, and hearing…