The language of touch binds our minds and bodies to the broader social world. What happens when touch becomes taboo?
Touch is the first sense by which we encounter the world, and the final
one to leave us as we approach death’s edge. ‘Touch comes before sight, before
speech,’ writes Margaret Atwood in her novel The Blind Assassin (2000).
‘It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.’ Human
foetuses are covered in fine hairs known as lanugo, which appear around 16
weeks of pregnancy. Some researchers believe that these delicate filaments
enhance the pleasant sensations of our mother’s amniotic fluid gently washing
over our skin, a precursor to the warm and calming feeling that a child, once
born, will derive from being hugged.
Touch has always been
my favourite sense – a loyal friend, something I can rely on to lift me up when
I’m feeling down, or spread joy when I’m on a high. As an Italian living abroad
for more than a decade, I often suffered from a kind of touch hunger, which had
knock-on consequences for my mood and health more generally. People in northern
Europe use social touch much less than people in southern Europe. In hindsight,
it’s not surprising that I spent the past few years studying touch as a
scientist.
Lately, though, touch
has been going through a ‘prohibition era’: it’s been a rough time for this
most important of the senses. The 2020 pandemic served to make touch the
ultimate taboo, next to coughing and sneezing in public. While people suffering
from COVID-19 can lose the sense of smell and taste, touch is the sense that
has been diminished for almost all of us, test-positive or not, symptomatic or
not, hospitalised or not. Touch is the sense that has paid the highest price.
But if physical
distance is what protects us, it’s also what stands in the way of care and
nurturance. Looking after another human being almost inevitably involves
touching them – from the very basic needs of bathing, dressing, lifting,
assisting and medical treatment (usually referred to as instrumental touch),
to the more affective tactile exchanges that aim to communicate, provide
comfort and offer support (defined as expressive touch).
Research in osteopathy and manual therapy, where practitioners have been
working closely with neuroscientists on affective touch, suggests that the beneficial effect of
massage therapy goes well beyond the actual manoeuvre performed by the
therapist. Rather, there is something special simply in the act of resting
one’s hands on the skin of the client. There is no care, there is no cure,
without touch.
The present touch
drought arrived after a period in which people were already growing more afraid
of touching one another. Technology has enabled this distance, as social
networking sites have become the primary source of social interaction for
children and adolescents. A recent survey showed that 95 per cent of teens
have access to a smartphone, and 45 per cent say that they are online
‘almost constantly’.
Another reason for
touch-scepticism is the growing global awareness of how touch is a weapon that
men use to impose their power over women. The #MeToo movement exposed how women
are expected to acquiesce to inappropriate touch as the cost of gaining access
to certain kinds of opportunities. Meanwhile, doctors, nurses, teachers and
salespeople are all guided against being too ‘hands-on’. Yet studies suggest
that touch actually improves the quality of our encounters with any of these
professionals, and makes us evaluate the experience more positively. For example, we are likely to give a more generous
tip to a waiter who absently touches our shoulder when taking the order than to
those who keep their distance.
What’s unique about
touch, when set against the other senses, is its mutuality. While we can look
without being looked back at, we can’t touch without being touched in return.
During the pandemic, nurses and doctors have talked about how this unique
characteristic of touch helped them communicate with patients. When they
couldn’t talk, smile or be seen properly because of their protective equipment,
medical professionals could always rely on a pat on the shoulder, holding a
hand or squeezing an arm to reassure patients and let them know that they were
not alone. In a pandemic where touch is a proven vector, paradoxically it’s
also a part of the cure. Touch really is the ultimate tool for social
connection, and the good news is that we were born fully accessorised to make
the most of it.
In the 1990s, there
was a wave of research demonstrating the shocking consequences of touch
deprivation on human development. Several studies showed that
children from Romanian orphanages, who were barely touched in the first years
of life, had cognitive and behavioural deficits later on, as well as
significant differences in brain development. In adulthood, people with reduced
social contact have a higher risk of dying earlier compared with
people with strong social relationships. Touch is especially important as we
age: for instance, gentle touch has been shown to
increase the amount of food intake in a group of institutionalised elderly
adults. Even when we can’t see, hear or speak as we used to, we can almost
always rely on touch to explore the world around us, to communicate with
others, and to allow them to communicate with us.
Science is now
beginning to provide an account of why touch matters so much. Touch on the skin
can reduce heartrate, blood pressure and cortisol levels – all factors related
to stress – in both adults and babies. It facilitates the release of oxytocin, a
hormone that provides sensations of calm, relaxation and being at peace with
the world. Every time we hug a friend or snuggle a pet, oxytocin is released in
our body, giving us that feel-good sensation. In this way, oxytocin appears to
reinforce our motivation to seek and maintain contact with others, which
assists in the development of humans’ socially oriented brains. Oxytocin also
plays a vital role in the relationship we have with ourselves.
In our lab, we
recently showed that oxytocin might promote processes of multisensory
integration, the so called ‘glue of the senses’ – the way the world typically
presents itself to us as a coherent picture, rather than as multiple distinct
streams of sense data. Multisensory integration, in turn, is at the root of our
sense of body ownership, the feeling that most take for granted, that our body
is ours. For our studies, we invited people to the lab, and induced
the Rubber Hand Illusion, a well-established set-up where participants look at
a lifelike rubber hand being touched while their own hand, hidden out of view,
is touched at the same time. After a minute or so of synchronous tactile
stimulation, the vast majority of participants experience the illusion that the
rubber hand is their own hand, that they embody the rubber
hand. We found that applying the tactile stimulation at slow, caress-like
velocities enhances the illusion of embodying the rubber hand. Furthermore, we
also found that giving participants one dose of
intranasal oxytocin before the illusion enhanced the experience, compared with
a placebo. In other words, affective touch and oxytocin might boost the process
that keeps us grounded to a physical body.
Touch is the first
sense to develop, and is mediated by the skin, our largest organ. We are one of
the few mammals to be born so premature in the trajectory of our development.
Our motor system isn’t fully developed, we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t regulate
our own temperature beyond a certain threshold – all of which means that we
rely on others to survive. As a child, being cared for depends primarily on
tactile contact and ‘being held’. Any basic activity involves touch, such as
changing nappies, having a bath, being fed, sleeping and, of course, cuddling.
Even after we make it through the first few months of life, social tactile
interactions are crucial for our development. For example,
postnatal depression is known to have negative consequences for infants, but
maternal touch can also have a protective effect. So encouraging tactile
interactions between mothers with depression and their babies can reduce
negative outcomes for the children later on in life. Importantly, the benefit
is reciprocal: skin-to-skin contact between infant and parent increases the
levels of oxytocin in mothers, fathers and infants, providing a feel-good
sensation, promoting the development of a healthy relationship, and enhancing
synchrony in parent-infant interactions.
Slow, caress-like
touch was more likely to communicate love, even when delivered by a stranger
Many neuroscientists
and psychologists believe that we have a dedicated system just
for the perception of social – affective – touch distinct from the one that we
use to touch objects. This system seems to be able to selectively recognise
caress-like touch; this is then processed in the insula, a brain area connected
to maintaining our sense of self and an awareness of our body. Slow,
caress-like touch is not only important for our survival, but also for our
cognitive and social development: for example, it can influence the way we
learn to identify and recognise other people from early in life. In a study of
four-month-old infants, when parents provided gentle stroking, children were
able to learn to identify a previously seen face better than those who
experienced non-tactile stimulation. It seems that slow, social touch might act
as a cue to pay particular attention to social stimuli, such as faces.
What’s particularly
important in infancy and childhood is not only the amount of touch we receive,
but also its nature and quality. In a recent study, my colleagues and I showed that infants as
young as 12 months are able to detect the way that their mothers touch them
during daily activities, such as during play time or while sharing a book
together. In our study, the mothers didn’t know that we were interested in
touch, which allowed us to have a real insight into their spontaneous interactions.
Importantly, we found that mothers’ ability to understand their infants’ needs
translated into a kind of tactile language: for example, those mothers who were
less aligned or responsive to their babies also tended to use more rough and
restrictive touch. Infants also tended to reciprocate, in that they were more
likely to use aggressive touch towards their mothers if this was the way that
they were touched.
It’s not an
exaggeration to talk of touch as a kind of language – one that we learn, like
spoken language, through social interactions with our loved ones, from the
earliest stages of our life. We use touch every day to communicate our
emotions, and to tell someone that we are scared, happy, in love, sad, sexually
aroused and much more. In turn, we are pretty good at reading other people’s
intentions and emotions based on the way that they touch us. In a recent study, we invited people to the lab and asked
them to detect the emotions and intentions that the experimenter was trying to
convey to them via touch. The touch was delivered at different velocities:
slower, as the touch typically occurring between parents and babies, or between
lovers; or faster, a type of touch more common between strangers. We found that
slow, caress-like touch was more likely to communicate love, even when the
touch was delivered by a stranger. In contrast, participants didn’t attribute
any special meaning or emotions to touch delivered at fast velocities.
Interestingly, in the case of brain damage involving the insula, people have
difficulties in perceiving affective touch, as well as disturbances in the
sense of body ownership. This suggests the existence of a specialised pathway
that arrives from the skin to a specific part of the brain.
We exchange tactile
gestures as communicative tokens not only to build social bonds, but to
establish power relationships. In professional Western contexts, people
typically apply a certain amount of pressure in a handshake when meeting
someone for the first time. A handshake stands as a proxy for competence and
confidence; we feel the other person touching us, and ask ourselves: ‘Do I
trust them enough to offer them a job?’ or ‘Should I let them babysit my kids?’
One study showed how a firm handshake was a key
indicator of success in a job interview, perhaps because the handshake is the
very first way that we close the physical gap between us and the other. The
handshake is also used to seal an agreement, with the force of a signature or
contract. The danger and vulnerability that’s intrinsic to touch is part of
what allows it to serve this socially binding function; indeed, it’s believed
that the handshake arose as a way of ensuring that the two people involved
weren’t holding weapons.
The language of touch
also affects the way that we relate to ourselves and our bodies across the
lifespan, with profound impacts on our psychological wellbeing. In another set
of studies, we investigated the way in which people with anorexia nervosa
perceive caress-like touch as compared with healthy people. Anorexia nervosa is
a severe eating disorder characterised by a distorted sense of one’s own body,
but it can also lead to a reduction in social interactions. We wanted to
understand whether the fact that sufferers report finding less pleasure in
social interaction might be related to the disorder. Across two studies, we found that people with anorexia
perceived slow touch delivered with a soft brush on their forearm to be less
pleasant, compared with healthy participants. Importantly, we found the same
pattern of results in people who have recovered from anorexia nervosa. This
suggests that this reduced capacity to take pleasure in touch might be more of
a stable characteristic rather than a temporary status, related to the severe
malnutrition that we observe in anorexia nervosa. This finding, along with
other studies, suggest that there is definitely a close link between social
touch and mental health. Throughout our lives, we need touch to flourish.
So, what happens to
our tactile fluency when we make touch taboo? At the times in our lives that we
are most fragile, we need touch more than ever. From everything we know about
social touch, it needs to be promoted, not inhibited. We need the nuance to
recognise its perils, but avoiding touch entirely would be a disaster. The
pandemic has given us a glimpse of what life would look like without touch. The
fear of the other, of contamination, of touch has allowed many of us to realise
how much we miss those spontaneous hugs, handshakes and taps on the shoulder.
Physical distancing leaves invisible scars on our skin. Tellingly, most people
mention ‘hugging my loved ones’ as one of the first things they want to do once
the pandemic is over.
Touch is so vital
that even the language of digital communication is saturated with touch
metaphors. We ‘keep in touch’, and acknowledge that we are ‘touched by your
kind gesture’. Some researchers have suggested that technology could enhance
our physical connection with others, prompting new kinds of interpersonal
tactile connections via hug blankets, kissing screens and caressing devices.
For example, a project based at University College London is exploring how
digital practices such as ‘Likes’ and emojis – signals that communicate
emotional states and social feedback – could extend to the remote manipulation
of textures and materials. Two people at a distance could each have a device
that detects and transmits tactile feedback: for example, my sensor could become warm and soft
when my partner on the other side of the world is available and wants to let me
feel their presence, or conversely, it could turn cold and rough if my partner
needs my presence.
Nothing can compare
with the magic of a physically intimate moment with someone
There’s a lot of
potential for these devices, especially for touch-deprived people such as the
elderly, people who live alone, or children in orphanages. Consider that 15
per cent of people worldwide live alone, often far away from
loved ones, and that statistics are suggesting that more and more people die
alone, too. What a difference it would make to have the possibility of being
physically close, even when far apart.
However, these
devices should be complementary to the power of a skin-to-skin tactile
exchange, rather than a substitute for it. Nothing can compare with the magic
of a physically intimate moment with someone, in which touch is often
accompanied by a cascade of other sensory signals such as smell, sound and body
temperature. Touch is physically and temporally proximal, in that it means ‘we
are close to each other and we are here now, together’. Unlike other senses
that can be digitalised, such as seeing someone’s face and talking to them over
Zoom, touch requires you to be in the same place, at the same time, with
another human being. A digitalised version of touch would be missing this rich
sharing of a specific moment in space and time, allowing a more limited
experience of what a hug could provide. If I could potentially pause or retract
from someone sending me a digital caress, that aspect of touch in which we
‘feel along with another person’ would fail.
In the current
environment, is the idea of a ‘renaissance of touch’ just for the brave and the
foolish? I don’t believe so, and scientific evidence speaks loud and clear. We
lose a lot by depriving ourselves of touch. We deprive ourselves of one of the
most sophisticated languages we speak; we lose opportunities to build new relationships;
we might even weaken existing ones. Through deteriorating social relationships,
we also detach from ourselves. The need for people to be able to touch one
another should be a priority in defining the post-pandemic ‘new normal’. A
better world is often just a hug away. As a scientist, but also as a fellow
human, I claim the right to touch, and to dream of a reality where no one will
be touchless.
To read more about
the body and emotions, visit Aeon’s sister site, Psyche, a new digital magazine that
illuminates the human condition through three prisms: mental health; the
perennial question of ‘how to live’; and the artistic and transcendent facets
of life.
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