We typically think of touch as a pleasant, but not particularly important part of life. But touch, which is the interface between our bodies and the outside world, does a lot more than bring us sensual pleasure.
Often ignored when we talk about our fundamental senses, the sensation of touch is a fundamental part of our daily experience, influencing what we buy, who we love and even how we heal. We use this sense to gather information about our surroundings and as a means of establishing trust and social bonds with other people.
In his book, Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind, Dr. David Linden convincingly argues that the “genes, cells and neural circuits involved in the sense of touch have been crucial to creating our unique human experience.”
Linden describes the body’s touch circuits as a “weird, complex and often counterintuitive system.” Largely due to this complexity, our scientific understanding of touch — particularly how it is processed in the brain — is limited compared to our knowledge of other senses.
“It’s only in the last couple years in studies of mice that we actually can identify what particular types of cells convey which types of touch sensation,” Linden told The Huffington Post. “There is enormous progress to be made in very clinically-relevant areas.”
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Part of the reason that elderly people are so prone to falls is that they are getting less tactile information from the soles of their feet. One of the ways for the elderly to combat falling is actually to go barefoot so that they have a better sense of the ground, Linden explains.
Touch can be therapeutic.
A large body of research — much of which has been conducted by Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami — suggests that therapeutic massage can be useful for a number of physical and mental ailments.
These therapeutic applications include pain relief, addiction recovery, and maintaining emotional equilibrium, cognitive function and mobility among an aging population, Linden suggested. Some research has also suggested that massage may be an effect way to treat anxiety, insomnia, headaches and digestive problems.
