Abstract This paper is going to look at the somatosensory system. This system is a sensory system made up of receptors that generate sensory variables such as pain and touch. The paper will start with a short introduction before looking at the anatomy and the physiology of the system. The paper will then look at the system and its relation to the brain and the spinal cord before concluding. Introduction The somatosensory system is a very wide system that has a web of receptors and centers of production that generate sensory variables such as temperature, body positioning, pain, and touch. These sensory receptors cover the skin, bones, joints external organs, and many other body parts and one of the main sensory modalities that are very crucial is touch. Touch is also called tactician or tactile somatosensory and is one of the five conventional senses since its impression comes from a mixture of sensory receptors. The somatosensory system is referred to as somatic senses in the medical realm to reflect all the processes involved in the whole system. This system reacts to diverse stimuli using a wide variety of receptors that transmit information through the tracts in the spinal cord to the central nervous system. Various reflectors are involved in the transmission process and they include thermal receptors, nociceptors, mechanical receptors, and chemical receptors. Processing of transmitted information takes place in the prime somatosensory part of the parietal lobe in the cerebral cortex. This system starts its work when the sensory neuron is activated by some special stimuli which include heat and this signal is relayed to a part of the central nervous system that responds to a specific part of the body. This works through point-to-point mapping of the body surfaces in the central nervous system to create what is scientifically known as the body image through a process called Homunculus (Hayward, 2004). This brain surface which is called a cortical map is not mutable and there are marked shifts that can occur in response to serious injuries or stroke. This system is spread all over the vital parts of the body of all mammals and vertebrates and the most important parts of the system are sensory receptors and afferent neurons that are found in the peripheral parts such as the human skin and deeper parts such as neurons in the brain. Structure of the somatosensory pathway A somatosensory pathway has three very long neurons and the first neuron has a cell body found in the dorsal root ganglion of the spinal nerve while the second one has its cell body located either in the spinal cord or the brainstem. The second neuron also has ascending axons which keep on crossing to either side of the spinal cord or the brainstem and these axons terminate the thalamus, the reticular system, or the cerebrum (Nolet, 2002). The third neuron addresses various types of pains and its neuron starts in the thalamus and ends at the postcentral part of the parietal lobe. In the periphery, the somatosensory system detects different types of stimuli. In the periphery, the somatosensory system detects a wide range of stimuli relayed by the sensory receptors such as the mechanical receptors and the nociceptors, and this sensory information is relayed to the central nervous sy