Sensitivity

Photo From Here

Doug Stowe over at Wisdom of the Hands had a post about sensitivity training for the hands prompted by an observation of an acupuncturist at work. This once again brought to mind something I've thought about for years but never really gotten an answer to. I've heard that the old safe crackers used to file down the skin on their fingertips to make them more sensitive so they could feel the tumblers drop when trying to crack a safe. The acupuncturist developed the sensitivity in the fingers by putting a hair in a phone book and then putting pages over the top of it until he/she could feel the hair through ten or eleven pages. Working around hot materials for years, I used to be able to pick up things that the average Joe would would find scalding hot. While that's not so much the case these days, even when I was used to doing a lot of manual work and my hands were pretty rough and calloused, I could feel the softness of someone else's hands when shaking hands in a greeting. How does it happen that your own hands can develop such a rough insulating layer that it's possible to pick up material that's 150 degrees but you can tell in just that brief moment that you shake hands with someone their hands are soft as a baby's bottom?