THE BIG TOE CARRIES THE GREATEST LOAD.
Each time you take a step, your foot rolls forward, shifting your body weight onto the ball of the foot as you prepare to push off into your next step. For most people, this means your big toe bears the load of your weight as you push off. Considering how many steps you take in a day, it’s no wonder people often experience pain in this toe. Despite being the biggest toe on the foot, the big toe only consists of two phalanges (or toe bones), the distal and proximal. Your other toes have three bones, but most of your big toe is made up of flesh and muscle.
YOUR BIG TOE AND GENITALS ARE NEIGHBORS … IN YOUR BRAIN.
The somatosensory cortex of your brain receives sensory information from all over the body. The part of the cortex that receives input from your feet happens to adjacent to the area that receives information from your genitals. Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego theorizes that foot fetishes could possibly result from a cross-wiring in the brain between the foot and the genital sensory centers.
THE BIG TOE SEPARATES HUMANS FROM APES.
Recently scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa determined that the base of the big toe, known as the hallux, is what makes it possible for humans to walk and run upright. They concluded that in other living apes, “the big toe is more thumb-like in facilitating grasping capabilities,” such as tree-climbing behaviors. In other words, our big toes demonstrate that humans are uniquely adapted to standing, walking, and running upright on two legs.
THERE'S A REASON STUBBING YOUR TOE HURTS SO &!@$# MUCH.
Toes are loaded with numerous nerve-ending receptors called nociceptors that are highly sensitive to actual and potential tissue damage. “When you stub your toe, you’re massively stimulating a bunch of these nerve fibers at the same time. Those signals integrate in your spinal cord, which in turn relays that information to your brain. “It’s just a really big input,” Allan Basbaum, chair of UCSF’s Department of Anatomy, told WIRED. “The brain reads that, and it hurts like hell.”