Right, I know it isn't direct. The ability to introduce aliasing and fool this perception system is the basis for haptic feedback systems. I was responding more

Right, I know it isn't direct. The ability to introduce aliasing and fool this perception system is the basis for haptic feedback systems. I was responding more narrowly to the topic of a frequency domain transform as you get from the cochlea. I didn't mean to suggest that there are not other "hardware" signal transforms or feature extraction happening prior to the nervous system signal processing. As I understand it, the touch sensing structures are more like a zero, first, and second derivatives (deformation/tension, velocity, acceleration) and these coincidentally have different frequency sensitivity curves. My reading is that in some ways this might be more similar to how our visual system integrates different photon detection signals to interpret color. Rather than the clear frequency domain transform of the cochlea, there are broadly overlapping sensitivity curves with only 2-3 peaks.