So many animals have whiskers. From cats to rats to seals, said mammals come equipped with a sensory aparatus us rubes don't have and ... researchers finally learned how whiskers actually work.
Rats, cats, and many other mammals have whiskers, which they typically use to sense their surrounding environment, akin to the sense of touch. But scientists have yet to precisely determine the means by which whiskers communicate that sense of touch to the brain. Now an interdisciplinary team at Northwestern University has come up with a new model to help predict how a rat's whiskers activate different sensory cells to do just that, according to a new paper published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. Such work could one day enable scientists to build artificial whiskers as tactile sensors in robotics as well as shed further light on human touch.
Seems it's how they bend.
Hartmann et al. found that rat whiskers are most likely to bend in an "S" shape within the follicle when they touch an object. This bending then pushes or pulls on the sensor cells, triggering them to send touch signals to the brain. The same bending profile results regardless of whether the whisker brushes against an object or is externally touched. And both intrinsic muscle contraction and an increase in blood pressure can improve the tactile sensitivity of the system.
"Our model demonstrates consistency in the whisker deformation profile between passive touch and active whisking," said co-author Yifu Luo, a graduate student in Hartmann's lab. "In other words, the same group of sensory cells will respond when the whisker is deflected in the same direction under both conditions. This result suggests that some types of experiments to study active whisking can be done in an anesthetized animal."
How cool is that? :)
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