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"These approaches, Brooks argues, ignore decades of research showing that human dexterity depends on an extraordinarily complex touch-sensing system. He cites work from Roland Johansson's lab at Umeå University showing that when a person's fingertips are anesthetized, a seven-second task of picking up and lighting a match stretches to nearly 30 seconds of fumbling. The human hand contains about 17,000 mechanoreceptors, with 1,000 concentrated in each fingertip alone. Recent research from David Ginty's lab at Harvard has identified 15 families of neurons involved in touch sensing, detecting everything from gentle indentation to vibrations to skin stretching. That's a lot of sensory information that current robot systems cannot yet capture or simulate."