Think about what it is to experience the sensation of touch. Across the vast expanse of our bodies, we are constantly touching—clothing draped on skin, shifts in air pressure, the slight drift of hair as head follows gaze from browser window to coffeecup and back again—but we are not constantly perceiving. We simply couldn't process it all, the flood of nigh limitless but mostly inconsequential sensations from all corners of our bodies vying for our focus. Too much touch would make us mad. But we seem to experience just the right amount of touch, perceiving it only past certain thresholds. The sensing is always happening, but it's only when sensation spikes enough that we're actually tasked with percieving it. This whole system is wrapped up into the general mystery of perception, or how we distill and organize information into meaningful representations of the world from sensory chaos.

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