From birth we humans are in fact skin more than we are anything else.
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In a certain sense, then, the newborn child’s skin is a type of brain, in the sense that it is the place where encounters with the world first freeze into the vague structurings of knowledge. And not coincidentally, the skin and the brain both originate from the same germ material, i.e., the embryo’s ectoderm layer.
Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics, University of Scranton Press, 2008