Jerusalem, 12 February, 2026 (TPS-IL) — Rats have long fascinated scientists with their incredible sense of touch, but new Israeli and Japanese research reveals just how sophisticated this ability really is. The study shows that rats’ whiskers are equipped with hidden mechanical and neural tricks that allow them to detect objects in their environment without being confused by their own movements.
More than 20 years ago, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science noticed a puzzling phenomenon: deep in the whisker follicles, some nerve cells stayed completely quiet even as the whiskers moved rapidly back and forth. These cells, later called “touch neurons,” fired only when the whiskers made contact with something in the world. Scientists wondered how these sensors could ignore the whisker’s own movement and respond only to external touch.
Whiskers, like human fingers, are packed with hundreds of “mechanoreceptors” — nerve cells that turn mechanical pressure into signals for the brain. Early studies showed a variety of receptor types, but it wasn’t clear how they worked together to give rats such precise tactile information.
The new study was led by research student Taiga Muramoto and Professor Satomi Abara of Osaka University, in collaboration with Weizmann scientists including Prof. Ehud Ahissar and Dr. Kanarik Bagdasarian. The team discovered that each whisker contains about 50 specialized touch neurons, located in a ring near the follicle’s center of mass — a spot that barely moves when the whisker vibrates. This arrangement keeps the neurons silent during self-generated movement.
Even more surprisingly, the follicle contains a dense ring of collagen that acts like a stabilizing weight.
“It reminded us of the weights found in skyscrapers,” Ahissar told The Press Service of Israel. “When the whisker moves, the collagen mass tends to stay in place. This protects the sensors at the base from being triggered by the whisker’s own motion.”
These adaptations are specific to rodents that actively move their whiskers. Cats, for example, have whiskers and sensors but don’t vibrate them, so they lack the same dense collagen and central neuron placement, Ahissar explained. “Rats and mice developed self-propulsion for all sorts of reasons, and measures were created to protect these sensitive sensors.”
Rats typically have about 35 whiskers on each side of their snout. Each whisker sends information about both movement and external touch to the brain, allowing rats to navigate even in total darkness. The study shows that precision in sensory perception doesn’t just happen in the brain — it starts at the very first receptor, where clever anatomical and mechanical features ensure accurate signals.
“This study is about sensory perception,” Ahissar told TPS-IL. “Wisdom is accumulated in all circuits of neural perception, even at the lowest level — the receptor itself. Here it shows how the tactile system solves a complex problem: distinguishing self-generated motion from external touch.”
The principles discovered in this research could also influence robotics and prosthetics. Active sensing — when sensors deliberately probe the environment, like whiskers or eyes — could potentially be more efficient than passive detection. “Anyone developing alternative sensory devices for the blind, or robots that sense their surroundings, can use the same principles,” Ahissar said. “Separating the movement you produce from the movement caused by the world is key.”
Mimicking rat whiskers’ ability to separate self-generated motion from external contact could enable robots to explore and manipulate objects more precisely, boost the dexterity of prosthetic hands or limbs, and improve VR gloves or exoskeletons to make touch interactions feel more precise and realistic.
The scientists plan to continue studying complementary mechanoreceptors, sensitive only to whisker motion, as well as human vision. “We want to understand how the visual system sees a stable world even though the eyes are constantly moving,” Ahissar told TPS-IL. “By applying these principles from biology, we hope to improve AI, robotics, and precise, low-energy sensory systems.”
The study was published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications.
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