14 DAY TRIAL // Most of the time, we have a pretty good idea of what our body is up to. Even blindfolded, we can scratch our ears, sit cross-legged or pick our nose. All the same, it looks like there are some body parts we are not quite as in touch with as we presume to be: our toes.
In fact, researchers at Oxford University say most of us are so out of tune with the miniature digits at the end of our feet we can't even tell them apart without looking at them first. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Some toes are trickier to recognize than others
In a paper published earlier this week in the journal Perception, the Oxford University research team explains how, as part of their investigation into how we, Homo sapiens sapiens, relate to our toes, they carried out an experiment with the help of volunteers.
First, the study participants were asked to close their eyes. Then, the scientists touched each of their fingers and toes, asking them to identify which digit was being stimulated.
The volunteers had no trouble naming the fingers that the researchers were touching. When the scientists moved on to prodding their toes, however, they got oddly confused.
Although tricky, identifying the big and the little toes was manageable. Recognizing the middle toes and telling them apart, nonetheless, turned out to be a most arduous task.
“People could correctly identify the finger being stimulated in 99% of cases. For the big and little toes, that fell to 94%. But for the middle toes, it was 57, 60 and 79%,” says researcher Nela Cicmil.
Apparently, what the study participants struggled the most with was telling the second and the third toes from one another. They would believe the second was the third and then they would think the third to be the fourth.
Even weirder, many of the volunteers talked about feeling like one of their toes was missing. “The people being tested here were healthy, yet some were reporting the feeling of a missing toe,” explains Nela Cicmil.
It all comes down to how our brain sees our toes
Scientist Nela Cicmil and fellow researchers at Oxford University believe the reason many people can't tell their toes apart when unable to look at them is that the brain doesn't sense them as proper, individual digits.
Rather, the specialists think the human brain is wired to feel our toes as five blocks dangling at the end of our feet. Where one toe ends and the other begins does not correspond with the boundaries of these blocks, and so the brain can easily get confused.
“We have suggested a model in which rather than sensing each toe separately, the brain just sees five blocks. The gaps between the actual toes do not correspond to the boundaries of those blocks” argues researcher Nela Cicmil.