The Power of Touch - Human Experience

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by Billy_B, Sep 23, 2017.

  1. Billy_B

    Billy_B Well-Known Member FCN Regular

    Thats awesome everyone, I'm glad you enjoyed it...
     
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  2. Billy_B

    Billy_B Well-Known Member FCN Regular

    'Emotional Map'

    Reveals Where Human Body Feels Gentle Touch
    By Tanya Lewis
    ' Indeed, a lack of touch can have a detrimental effect on both our physical health and our psychological well-being,'

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    WASHINGTON — From the stroke of a mother's hand to the embrace of a lover, sensations of gentle touch activate a specialized set of nerves in humans.

    The brain is widely believed to contain a "map" of the body for sensing touch. But humans may also have an emotional body map that corresponds to feelings of gentle touch, according to new research presented here Sunday (Nov. 16) at the 44th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. For humans and all social species, touch plays a fundamental role in the formation and maintenance of social bonds, study researcher Susannah Walker, a behavioral neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University in the United KIngdom, said in a news conference.

    Human contact

    In a clinical setting, physical contact with premature infants has been shown to boost growth, decrease stress and aid brain development. But not much research has focused on the basis of these effects in the nervous system, Walker said.

    The human body has a number of different kinds of nerves for perceiving touch. Thicker nerves surrounded by a fatty layer of insulation (called myelin) identify touch and temperature and rapidly send those signals to the brain, whereas thinner nerves that lack this insulation send sensory information more slowly.

    Recently, scientists discovered a subset of these smaller nerves, called C-tactile afferents, that respond specifically to feelings of gentle touch. But Walker wanted to know how these nerves are arranged in the body, and whether simply seeing another person being touched would elicit the same pleasurable feelings as those someone experiences when being touched.

    In the study, the researchers touched people on different parts of their bodies, including the back, the upper arm, the forearm and the hand. They stroked each of these regions at different speeds.

    When people were asked to rate the pleasure of each touch, they reported it was most pleasant when they were touched on the back, and least pleasant when they were touched on the forearm. These body regions correspond to the concentrations of gentle touch nerves, the researchers said. In other words, the back contains the most of these types of nerves, while the forearm contains the fewest.

    It turns out that these gentle-touch nerves respond most strongly to being touched at a particular speed, between 1.2 and 3.9 inches per second (3 and 10 centimeters per second). The participants in the study reported that the most pleasurable touches were those that matched this optimal speed.

    Measuring enjoyment

    The researchers also showed people videos of other people being touched, and they found the viewers experienced a response similar to that when they were touched themselves.

    The findings, which have not yet been published in a scientific journal, suggest that mammals have evolved a specialized system of nerves that convey the pleasure of gentle physical contact, and that these nerves form the basis of an emotional map of the body.

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    In the future, Walker and her colleagues plan to measure the movement of smiling facial muscles in response to being touched gently, to see whether these sensations produce an automatic feeling of enjoyment.

    Other research presented here this weekend found that a person's enjoyment of being touched depends very much on the context. For example, a study of heterosexual men found that they reported a touch as much more pleasant when it came from a woman as opposed to from another man.

    Although Walker's study focused mostly on the positive effects of gentle touch, different people probably experience a range of pleasure, Walker said.


    Tanya Lewis

    Tanya was a staff writer for Live Science from 2013 to 2015, covering a wide array of topics, ranging from neuroscience to robotics to strange/cute animals. She received a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a bachelor of science in biomedical engineering from Brown University. She has previously written for Science News, Wired, The Santa Cruz Sentinel, the radio show Big Picture Science and other places. Tanya has lived on a tropical island, witnessed volcanic eruptions and flown in zero gravity (without losing her lunch!).


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  3. PumpkinPie

    PumpkinPie Guest

    Ohh, I always say hugs are medicine!
    Personally, I will never experience a touch like the first time I touched my daughter's face with the tip of my finger, to this day I still remember not the way her skin felt, but rather the way it made me feel inside. Hugs rock xx.
     
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  4. Billy_B

    Billy_B Well-Known Member FCN Regular

    Just a Touch Can Influence Thoughts and Decisions

    Touching a soft or hard object can influence how a person thinks or even makes decisions, researchers now say.

    The same goes for the sensations of feeling smooth or rough objects, and holding heavy or light objects, according to a series of six experiments. Such tactile sensations may encourage thoughts of abstract conceptsconnected to touch-related metaphors, and could affect how people haggle over the price of a new car or negotiate high-stakes diplomacy.


    For instance, hardness may evoke concepts of stability, rigidity and strictness. Roughness can lead to thoughts of difficulty and harshness, while heaviness conjures up impressions of importance and seriousness.

    "Those tactile sensations are not just changing general orientation or putting people in a good mood," said Joshua Ackerman, an assistant professor of marketing at MIT in Boston, Mass. "They have a specific tie to certain abstract meanings."

    Ackerman developed the six studies with psychologists at Harvard University in Boston and Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Their work is detailed in the June 24 issue of the journal Science.


    The researchers pointed out that touch develops first among the human senses, and yet it tends to receive the least attention from scientists or others.

    More than a feeling

    Holding heavy or light clipboards influenced how seriously people reacted to scenarios in the first two studies. Heavy-clipboard holders rated job candidate resumes as being more serious, but did not rate candidates higher on the metaphorically irrelevant trait of social likeability.

    Men who held a heavy clipboard chose to allocate more money to serious social issues, such as air pollution standards, during the second study. Women allocated almost the max amount to serious social issues regardless of whether they held a heavy or light clipboard.

    But the weight of the clipboards did not affect how much men or women allocated to less important issues, such as regulation of public bathrooms.

    People who played with rough puzzle pieces that felt like sandpaper rated a neutral social interaction as being more difficult or harsh, compared with people who handled smooth puzzle pieces, in the third study.

    A more complicated result arose from the fourth study's ultimatum game, where participants could choose to share 10 tickets for a $50 lottery with an anonymous (fake) participant. The anonymous participant could either accept the offer or reject it, so that rejection led to neither person getting anything.

    Rough puzzle handlers chose to offer more tickets. That may reflect how the participants viewed the other player as potentially being difficult or "tough cookies," and so they became more generous to compensate for the higher risk of a doomed negotiation.

    "We were a little bit surprised that people were being more generous," Ackerman told LiveScience. "It suggests that people are not just being negative."

    Hard negotiations

    Hardness came into play during the fifth study, where participants touched either a soft blanket or a hard block of wood. Those who felt the hard block rated an employee in a boss-employee interaction as being more rigid or unyielding, but did not view the employee more negatively.

    Perhaps the most unexpected result came out of the last study, where participants did not use their hands at all. Instead, they sat on either a hard or soft chair as they negotiated the price of a new car with the sticker price $16,500, and had the chance to place two bids.

    People who sat on the hard chairs ended up changing their offer price between the first and second bid by an average of $896.50. By contrast, people who sat on soft chairs willingly changed their bids by an average of $1,243.60.

    That effect of even a passive touch shocked Ackerman and his colleagues, who had come up with the sixth study almost on a whim. It also inspired them to tackle a seventh study, which was not included in the official write-up.

    Participants who played with rough or smooth puzzle pieces then had to try walking a drawn tightrope on the ground. People who had touched the rough puzzle pieces ended up falling off the "tightrope" more often – a result that the researchers hope to investigate more in the future.

    You've got the touch

    All these studies support an idea proposed by Ackerman and his colleagues known as scaffolding, where humans learn to grasp abstract mental concepts by relying upon physical sensations. Both scaffolding and the related concept known as neural reuse have gained support over the years, but remain debated among scientists.

     
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  5. Billy_B

    Billy_B Well-Known Member FCN Regular

    Yes, quite amazing the human body and in it simplicity the act of touch, is capable of either giving or taking life
     
  6. Lakeside

    Lakeside Well-Known Member FCN Regular

    Money:
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    I have never been that involved in a relationship. The current one is probably the most intense I have experienced but we both agreed when we started, It was just for a limited time so have no expectations. Knowing I'll be getting out makes it easier to not stress about getting in, if that makes sense. :)
     
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  7. Billy_B

    Billy_B Well-Known Member FCN Regular

    Voices from Solitary: Fly in the Ointment
    By VOICES FROM SOLITARY


    Peter Collins has been in prison for more than 30 years and is one of Canada’s longest-serving prisoners. He is currently incarcerated at Bath Institution near Kingston, Ontario. Collins is an award-winning human rights activist, writer, artist and peer health educator. In 2008, he was awarded the Canadian Award for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights for his work fighting for the health and human rights of prisoners. He has tutored others in prison, led seminars on HIV and Hepatitis-C prevention, and helps individuals prepare for parole hearings. While incarcerated, he taught himself to play the guitar and to paint. He has become a champion of prison justice issues and is a vocal advocate on issues such as systemic racism, overcrowding, harm reduction programs, and the importance of remembering those who have died behind prison walls.

    Collins, who was convicted of the murder of a police officer, has been eligible for full parole since 2008 but has been repeatedly denied. He was raised in Canada but has British citizenship and is under a deportation order that would see him immediately sent to the UK if released. This puts him in a catch-22 as the parole board claims it has inadequate mechanisms to ensure mandatory supervision in a foreign country, despite his submission of a comprehensive release plan in England. Collins was recently diagnosed with aggressive, terminal cancer and told he has only months to live. His case has been sent to the parole board for another early hearing under a provision allowing for compassionate release of dying prisoners. He is still waiting for a date for the special hearing.

    Collins was originally placed in the Secure Housing Unit of a super-max prison and has spent long stretches in solitary confinement, including a six-month period when he was falsely accused of another prisoner’s murder. He recently wrote, narrated and directed from inside prison this short film called Fly in the Ointment about a prolonged period he spent in solitary. —Garrett Zehr
     
  8. Billy_B

    Billy_B Well-Known Member FCN Regular

    The Life of the Skin-Hungry: Can You Go Crazy from a Lack Of Touch?
    As we live in an increasingly technology-focussed, socially disconnected world, we're touching each other much less than before. But what does an absence of touch do to a person?

    In Peter Collins' short film, Fly in the Ointment, he narrates yearning for human touch—his wife's caress—while a fly flickers monochromatically in a lidded jar. "I felt her soft finger tracing a line along my back as she whispered loving words to me... I dreamt of being held, touched and loved.

    One of Canada's longest-serving prisoners, Collins spent long stretches in solitary confinement since his incarceration in 1984 for first-degree murder. Fly in the Ointment recounts his experience of being confined alone in a six by nine foot cell, deprived of human contact, intimacy, or touch.
    For the estimated 80,000 Americans currently held in some form of isolated confinement, the thought of being touched with care by another human being is an impossible dream. But people outside of the prison population—otherwise well-connected, sociable people—can also powerfully long for human touch.

    What some psychologists term "skin hunger" (also known as touch hunger) is a need for physical human contact. Although many people sate their skin hunger through sex, skin hunger isn't exactly a sexual need. Satisfying your skin hunger requires you to have meaningful physical contact with another person, and failing to observe your need for human touch can have profound emotional, even physical, consequences.

    Scientists began investigating skin hunger shortly after the Second World War. In controversial experiments run by American psychologist Harry Harlow, infant rhesus macaques were separated from their birth mothers and given the option of two inanimate surrogates: one made out of wire and wood, and another covered in cloth. The baby monkeys overwhelmingly favored the embrace of the cloth surrogate, even when the wire mother was the only surrogate that held a bottle of milk.

    From this, Harlow deduced infant macaques needed more than nourishment from their mothers to stay alive. He termed it "contact comfort." As a result of Harlow's research, we now know that human beings need touch, particularly in childhood, almost as powerfully as they need basic necessities like food and water.

    Researchers have shown that touch can communicate a range of emotions, serving as an important social tool, and even the act of hugging can reduce your levels of the stress hormone cortisol. A study from the Touch Research Institute, part of the University of Miami, found that Parisian teenagers hanging out in McDonald's restaurants (France is deemed a "high contact" culture) overwhelmingly touched each other more than their American peers, and were less likely to exhibit symptoms of aggression.

    "Touching each other keeps the peace," explains Dr Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute. A pioneer in the field of skin hunger, Field has long advocated for touch to be reintroduced into educational systems, where fears about sexual abuse and possible litigation have led some US schools to implement no-touch policies. "Touch facilitates intimacy, and most people you touch won't respond with aggression."

    It's possible to be touch hungry and not even know it—or even to mistake your symptoms for poor mental health. "People who are touch hungry usually present as being depressed individuals," Field says. "They're withdrawn; their voice intonation contour is flat." She adds that people suffering from clinical depression may also often suffer from touch hunger—and this can be seen in an area of the brain called the vagus. "When you massage these people, their depression levels go down and their vagal activity goes up."

    Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychologist and author who has spent decades testifying as an expert witness on behalf of those in solitary confinement, has seen the effects of skin hunger firsthand. "Physical contact is a requirement of being human," says Kupers. "There's something healing about it. It [touch] is not just correlated with being human—it is being human."

    Kupers is allowed to shake prisoners' hands when examining them in the state of Mississippi, where he often testifies. "When I touch a prisoner at the Mississippi isolation unit, they tell me, 'You're the first person I've touched except for officers putting handcuffs on me. Aside from that, nobody has touched me in all the years I've been in solitary confinement.'"

    He describes the psychiatric literature showing that solitary confinement causes lasting mental health problems as "voluminous." As the mental health issues that plague prisoners in solitary confinement are so vast, it's difficult to isolate an absence of touch as a major contributing factor, but neuroscientist Huda Akil identifies a lack of touch—alongside other factors—as potential factors that might lead the brain to rewire itself and cause psychological problems. The testimony of prisoners such Peter Collins and Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning highlights how an absence of touch exacerbates the experience of solitary confinement: Writing in the Guardian, Chelsea Manning describes it as "'no-touch' torture."
    Besides prisoners in solitary confinement, there is another demographic that illustrates the debilitating effects of skin hunger: the elderly. Being extremely lonely can amount to a chronic medical condition, and it's one that is more likely to surface in later life as friends and family members die off. One study found that lonely people aged 50 and over were twice as likely to die as their non-lonely peers. In comments reported in USA Today, psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser argues that the elderly need prolonged physical contact more than younger generations: "The older you are, the more fragile you are physically, so contact becomes increasingly important for good health."

    Research shows that people in Western societies overwhelmingly feel lonelier. According to the National Science Foundation's 2014 General Social Study, a quarter of Americans feel they have no one they can talk to about their problems. One study from British relationship charity Relate finds almost ten percent of people have no close friendships at all, and 20 percent of those in relationships rarely feel "loved." Concurrently, we're spending more time online than ever before: British adults average 21.6 hours a week, according to recent statistics.

    Conventional wisdom holds that technology is turning us into maladroit loners, even if it should, in theory, make us more connected. If you took a paper and pencil and stencilled the outline of the average person's online presence—like a modern day Vitruvian man—you could sketch out a web of stretching connections, too numerous to count. Millions of fibre optic cables connect us to our social networks: friends, followers, email acquaintances, even lurkers. So why do we feel more isolated than ever before? Could it have something to do with the fact that none of these connections involve human touch?

    "The ease with which we communicate now is probably the biggest change of the last twenty years," explains Professor Kory Floyd of the University of Arizona, an expert in the communication of affection in close relationships. "In some instances, it encourages us to be less thoughtful of what we say—but it doesn't have to."

    Having studied affection for nearly two decades, however, Floyd believes verbal or written communication is no substitute for physical touch. "There's an immediacy to touch that words don't have. And there are certain health benefits that seem to be more pronounced when affection is expressed through tactile ways."

    Like a pair of binoculars flipped the wrong way, the Internet can have the effect of making us closer together or further apart—depending on how you look at it. No movement illustrates this more powerfully than the Free Hugs initiative, which began in June 2004.
    Most of us have seen someone at a music festival wandering around with a "Free Hugs" sign before, but few realize one individual—a Sydney resident who goes by the pseudonym Juan Mann—was behind it. Unlike cuddle parties where you'll pay $45 to be spooned by a stranger ineptly concealing his boner, Mann wanted to bring free affection to the masses.

    "I started giving out Free Hugs mostly because at the time I had nobody around. No-one hugged me or socialized with me," he explains over email. "Then out of nowhere this young woman came up to me at a party and hugged me. For the first time in months I felt alive. It got me thinking about all the other lonely people out there in the world who might need or want a hug."
     
  9. ZombieStrife

    ZombieStrife Member

    Money:
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    I agree entirely.. ones warmth is always desired by another. The natural attraction ,either positive or negative, results in affection or fight. Regaurdless of the type of touch the desire and longing for it is just the same.
     
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  10. Billy_B

    Billy_B Well-Known Member FCN Regular

    6A8AE655-0CE3-497F-85E9-69A66C252C27.jpeg The Effect of Human Contact on Newborn Babies
    Newborn babies are experiencing everything for the first time, including their first touch from mom and dad. This early contact helps promote healthy psychological and physical development. Lack of physical contact can prevent normal development and can even lead to higher rates of illness or death in infants. Your touch can be especially important for your premature infant or infant born at a low birth weight. Healthy, effective contact with your baby includes cuddling, gentle massage, stroking and holding your newborn.

    D3E72E02-7377-4412-AB58-DC779184B124.jpeg

    Human contact is an important aspect of caring for your newborn. The health of a your new baby is highly dependent on receiving touch stimulation from other people. Infants who are touched gently on a regular basis gain weight and grow at better rates than babies who lack this contact. They also spend less time in the hospital after birth and have fewer medical complications in their first year of life.

    The first contact a newborn has with you, his mother, sets off cascades of hormones in his body that benefit his health and help him regulate his body temperature. Your touch can lower the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in his body, leading to better sleep patterns in infancy and a tendency to be less fearful or inhibited later in life. Also, the bonding hormone oxytocin rises during physical contact between your newborn and his parents, increasing the feelings of attachment between members of the new family. Being held close to you helps your new baby to regulate his body temperature, allowing him to conserve energy.

    Skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth and in the first few days of life is one kind of human touch that can particularly benefit your baby. Sometimes called “kangaroo care” or “kangaroo mother care,” this skin-to-skin contact can help improve your baby's breastfeeding ability and growth rates. Premature babies especially need skin-to-skin human touch to help them survive and thrive, and kangaroo-care advocates point out that a preemie baby's temperature is regulated better when the baby is given skin-to-skin contact with the mother than when placed in an incubator, leading to better survival rates for these infants.

    88A4CB55-C3C8-40F8-830B-5D07063FE0C8.jpeg

    Human contact for newborn babies should not be limited to you, the mother, but should also include your partner as well. Although babies often receive a lot of physical contact with their mothers, fathers are less likely to share physical contact with their new babies, especially if the mother is breastfeeding. However, contact between your partner and your new baby promotes family bonding and makes the baby feel more secure and relaxed. Touch between you, your partner and your newborn can facilitate the bonding process from the first moments after birth. Healthy bonding with both parents can also help your infant develop better psychologically and socially later in life.

    Babies who don't receive human contact in their first days or weeks of life often suffer from health problems related to this deprivation. They can exhibit a failure to thrive, a condition seen in orphanages among children who did not receive enough human contact when they were babies. Newborns denied physical contact with other humans can actually die from this lack of contact, even when provided with proper nutrition and shelter.

    Ref: https://www.livestrong.com/article/72120-effect-human-contact-newborn-babies/





     

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