The myelinated fibers innervating the 11 rays were photographed and counted from an enlarged photomontage by Catania and colleagues. The total number of myelinated fibers for half of the star ranged from 53,050 to 93–94; hence the total fibers for the entire star vary from roughly 106,000 to 117,000. This means that tactile information from the environment is transmitted to the SNC rapidly. This would be insufficient without an adequate processing system, but in the star-nosed mole, the processing also occurs at a very high speed almost approaching the upper limit at which nervous systems are capable of functioning. The threshold at which the mole can decide whether or not something is edible is of 25 milliseconds: 12 milliseconds to the neurons in the mole’s somatosensory cortex to respond to touch and other 5 milliseconds for motor commands to be conducted back to the star. In comparison, this whole process takes 600 milliseconds in humans.