The sense of touch is one of our most important channels for communicating with the environment. While vision allows us to identify and locate objects in space, somatosensation is the only sensation that provides direct information about contacting with objects that allows us to interact with them effectively. From picking up a cup to drink, to grasp a pen to write, to touch our loved ones and express our emotions, touch plays an important role in our affective lives and is critical to our ability to dexterously interact with objects. Indeed, tactile feedback is indispensable to make smooth and precise movement execution, patients who lack tactile signals could not achieve smooth motor execution. However, our understanding of tactile processing differs along various stages of the tactile ascending pathway. In primates, the coding of tactile information has been extensively studied in the nerve and in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) while our understanding of the middle structures, the dorsal column nuclei and the thalamus, are limited. Hence, the goal of my dissertation is to investigate how tactile information is represented at the first synapse along the dorsal-column medial lemniscus pathway (DCML), the Cuneate nucleus (CN), that receives tactile and proprioceptive information from the upper body. I characterized the receptive field structure of CN neurons, determined the convergence of input from multiple sensory channels, documented the temporal and spatial processing of information in CN and investigated the state dependence of cutaneous sensitivity in CN. Overall, I gained understanding of the process and calculations happening at this previously neglected region.