When a burn occurs, nociceptors in your skin generate an electrical impulse that travels via sensory neurons through the spinal cord to the thalamus in the brain, which then relays it to the somatosensory cortex for perception; the motor response travels back via efferent pathways. But I have seen in the cadaver lab how individual variations in nerve pathways exist, like tangled roots in a field. So the textbook signal path is not a perfect highway for every person! This reminds me of my own grandfather, a farmer, who had such severe neuropathy from diabetes that he rarely felt such burns at all.
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