—Fred Rosen, Los Angeles, California Three reasons, mainly: One, our fingers (where most paper cuts occur) are dense with nerve endings. The fingertip has the highest spatial acuity for both pain and touch in the entire body. Even if our toes were nimble, can you imagine one toe able to feel a single page well enough to turn the pages of a book one at a time? Two, paper cuts are so superficial that nerve fibers are exposed but undamaged, thus able to communicate pain fully. And third, paper cuts appear clean, but they are actually rough compared to a knife cut of the same length and depth, for example, and so they hurt much more.

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