Current Biology
Magazine
Feature
Are we losing touch with our world?
Neuroscience is only beginning to understand how a pleasant touch like a caress
becomes a rewarding sensation. Although touch is clearly important for human
well-being, communication and cognition, there are current trends that lead to the
risk of losing the tactile connection with others as well as with nature and objects.
Michael Gross reports.
Finland has gone through some
difficult times in the early parts of
the 20th century, including years of
hunger and war, leaving many children
deprived of a safe home environment
and affectionate care. Moreover, a
traditional agricultural society with
education principles focused on
corporal punishment and respecting
the elders prevailed until well past the
middle of the century.
Taina Kinnunen from the University
of Eastern Finland observed echoes of
these past hardships after she asked
dozens of volunteers to write their own
‘touch biographies’ — reflections on
the roles that touch experiences have
played in their lives. Together with
Marjo Kolehmainen from the University
of Tampere, Finland, she has now
published an analysis of the relationship
between touch and affect that can be
gleaned from these texts (Body Soc.
(2019) 25, 29–56).
A large number of older contributors
wrote about the lack of caring touch
experienced in early stages of their
lives. Some even appear to have
suffered cumulative trauma from the
absence of a caring environment. Many
described Finland as a culture that is
touch-avoidant and encourages self-
reliance as an important value.
Some participants reported distant
memories of how a single event of
touching or hugging changed the
course of their lives, and in one case
saved the life of someone suffering
from depression. On the other hand,
episodes of transgressive touch,
violence and abuse also feature in
some of the reports, highlighting the
ambivalent relationship we have with
the inter-human touch.
Whether it is the lack, the life-
changing nature or the unwanted
intrusion of touch, all these
recollections gathered in the unique
format of touch biographies show how
important the tactile sense is for our
human experience, for our identification
as one human body in touch with
others. Research is only beginning to
explore this kind of mechanosensory
input to our minds.
A gentle touch
Neuroscience has traditionally described
four kinds of sensory modalities in
the skin, responding to temperature,
pressure, itch and pain. Only relatively
recently the pleasant sensation of a
gentle caress was added to the range of
phenomena studied. Microneurography
studies in the 1990s demonstrated that
a group of nerve cells in the skin known
as C-fibre tactile afferents (CT afferents)
respond preferentially to a gently moving
stimulus.
In contrast to the fast-conducting,
myelin-covered neurons that report
the first contact with a touch stimulus
within milliseconds, the unmyelinated
CT afferents conduct signals into the
brain much more slowly. It may take
a second or two before their signals
Healing hands: The human sense of touch is important for well-being, but current trends in soci-
ety tend to discourage touching behaviours. (Photo: andreas160578/Pixabay.)
Current Biology 29, R265–R279, April 22, 2019
reach the brain. They are present in the
(potentially) hairy parts of our skin, but
not, for instance, in the soles of our feet
and palms of our hands. They show the
strongest reaction at the kind of stroke
speed that people also tend to report
as the most pleasant, which is around 3
centimetres per second.
Francis McGlone from Liverpool John
Moores University, UK, and colleagues
have argued the case that these CT
afferents are the neurological substrate
for the sensations of affect and reward
emanating from a caressing touch
(Neuron (2014) 82, 737–755) and most
importantly that they play a significant
role in shaping the developing social
brain, as case studies of touch
deprivation suggest.
“The empirical evidence has been
growing steadily over the past 20 years
and has relied on the data we have
collected from single-unit recordings of
CTs in humans using the technique of
microneurography,” McGlone explains.
“These nerves are tuned to precisely
the forces and velocities of gentle touch
that people will report as pleasant. They
project to limbic (affect) processing
areas in the brain and not to the
classical somatosensory cortex.”
Beyond having the official
confirmation that there are good
biological reasons why a caress feels
pleasant, there is also the potential
to use the effect in helpful ways. For
instance, a recent contribution in this
R265

Soft touch: A tactile experience of nature and wildlife is increasingly rare as urbanisation and
technology progress. (Photo: Asinno/Flickr.)
journal from Rebeccah Slater’s group
at the University of Oxford, UK, in
collaboration with McGlone showed
that a well-timed stroke can reduce a
baby’s negative response to necessary
medical interventions like the heel lance
applied after birth (Curr. Biol. (2018) 28,
1380–1381).
Losing touch
Considering the importance of touch for
well-being as highlighted by the Finnish
study and the emerging neurobiological
studies elucidating mechanisms for the
connection between touch sensation
and affect, it is surprising that there
are so many cultural barriers aiming to
avoid it.
Around the globe, cultural norms
around touch vary wildly. Japanese
etiquette features elaborate bowing
instead of the Western handshake,
whereas in France’s social greeting
rituals the question is not whether to
kiss but how many kisses are required.
In a recent essay on touching culture
and personal space in China, the
journalist Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
reports that she often observed close
personal contact between complete
strangers, in ways that are directly
opposite to the US-style concept of
personal space. While the people
involved appeared to be unaware that
anything unusual was happening at
all, expatriate Chinese contacts told
R266 Current Biology 29, R265–R279, April 22, 2019
the author that her observations likely
related to the touching culture of people
from rural communities now living in the
new cities (granta.com/touch).
Many Western societies are now
responding to a growing awareness of
abuse cases by becoming more touch-
avoidant. As this article goes to press,
the former US vice-president Joe Biden
is facing allegations of unsolicited
touching, which may block him from
seeking a Democratic nomination for
the 2020 presidential elections.
Long known for what some describe
as his ‘tactile mannerisms’, Biden
faces allegations of nose-rubbing and
head-kissing. The contacts in question
are all far removed from any sexual
connotations, but in the current climate
they are still strong enough to make
him look like a man of a bygone era,
his quaint touching habits ironically ‘out
of touch’ with today’s more stringent
perceptions of consent and personal
space.
The speaker of the US House of
Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, used
a recent interview to advise Biden
to keep his distance from his fellow
human beings. “Join the straight-arm
club with me,” Pelosi said, referring to
Biden. “He’s an affectionate person, to
children, to senior citizens, to everyone,
but that’s just not the way.”
In the UK, meanwhile, there have
been reports suggesting that teachers
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are instructed not to touch children
under any circumstances even if
they need to be comforted or have
been wounded and need a plaster.
Similarly, doctors and other medical
professionals are increasingly avoiding
skin contact even when a helpful
or comforting hand might be useful
for their task. In a recent podcast
discussing touch with McGlone,
medical doctor Rangan Chatterjee
noted that he ceased touching patients
to comfort them in situations where he
would have done so until a few years
ago (https://drchatterjee.com/).
Writing in the UK newspaper The
Guardian last year, the journalist Paula
Cocozza diagnosed that “In countless
ways, social touch is being nudged
from our lives.” Recording her own
experience in a touch diary, Cocozza
found that she had only touched five
people to whom she was not related in
the previous seven days.
Francis McGlone is also worried
that society is losing its collective
sense of touch, which means people
will become more disconnected
and atomised. “The presence of the
CT afferents in the skin of all social
mammals is not some evolutionary
‘appendix’ remnant, they provide the
glue that bonds us socially,” McGlone
says. If this social glue is lost, the
consequences may directly lead to
suffering. For the rapidly-growing
older demographic, the lack of contact
in a literal and metaphorical sense
translates to a pervasive loneliness
problem and can have psychiatric
effects.
For children deprived of affective
touch for years, investigations of those
who lived in the notorious Romanian
orphanages that came to the world’s
attention after the fall of the Ceauş escu
regime in 1989 have shown that early
tactile deprivation has an adverse
effect on brain development. For
instance, a 1994 study of Romanian
orphans between the ages of 23 and
50 months living in the Leagan de
Copii in Timisoara, Romania, showed
that all orphans exhibited deficits in
cognitive and social functioning and the
majority were severely delayed. Long-
term studies of Romanian orphanage
populations also revealed long-lasting
damaging effects (JAMA Psychiatry
(2018) https://doi.org/10.1001/
jamapsychiatry.2018.2556).
Current Biology
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Observations like those from Finland
and Romania suggest that, if the
hypervigilance brought about by the
increased visibility of abuse cases leads
to a widespread touch deprivation, this
may have dramatic consequences for
the mental and physical health of an
entire generation.
Losing touch with nature
It is not only the inter-human touch that
appears to be in decline. As humanity
becomes rapidly more urbanised
at a global scale (Curr. Biol. (2016)
26, R1205–R1208), and as Western
societies have become more risk-
averse, there are fewer opportunities to
experience nature directly, in a hands-
on way, and particularly for children to
learn about it by feeling their way.
Speaking at a recent Earthwatch
event at Oxford, the UK naturalist
and broadcaster Simon King reported
that in his outreach work with school
groups he often encountered children
with a reluctance to touch any plants
or animals in the wild, for fear of being
told off for getting their hands dirty.
King was promoting a new Earthwatch
initiative called ‘Naturehood’ which is
aimed at creating community-based
nature networks in UK cities.
For nearly half a century now,
Earthwatch has been encouraging
people to actively get in touch with
nature by embracing the positive
impact of citizen science. It brings
volunteers, science and nature together
in a hands-on way, to understand
the importance of protecting wildlife
and tackling environmental issues.
In recent years, Earthwatch has had
a focus on working with businesses
to educate employees on the impact
they can have within industry. Fee-
paying volunteers can also partake in
expeditions, assisting as field workers
in environmental and ecological
research around the world, working in
places like Madagascar or Belize (Curr.
Biol. (2012) 22, R287–R289).
The new project focusing on local
communities and the rapidly growing
field of urban ecology (Curr. Biol.
(2018) 28, R635–R638) shifts the focus
closer to home and thus enables the
participation of those who may not
have the time or resources to join
expeditions in faraway lands.
With the first ‘naturehoods’ in Oxford
and Swindon launching this spring, the
Right note: Only very few artisan professions, like the luthier, continue to involve tactile contact
with the material being processed. (Photo: Marco Verch/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)
organisation aims to create “a citizen
science project that will encourage
communities to create urban networks
for butterflies, bees, hedgehogs,
frogs and birds by making their own
spaces more wildlife friendly and by
taking positive actions for wildlife,”
as the Earthwatch website notes.
“Participants will be able to learn
more about the wildlife that is in their
spaces through citizen science wildlife
surveys, which will support vital
research into what actions can have
the greatest positive impact for wildlife
in our towns and cities. There will be
free community engagement events
in local Naturehoods including wildlife
walks, talks, and family-friendly DIY for
wildlife workshops.”
Even working scientists may today
have fewer opportunities to physically
handle the objects of their studies, as
research becomes more automated,
abstract and remote from nature.
In an age of studying big data and
invisibly small molecular machinery,
it is becoming the exception that
researchers discover something new
using old-fashioned field work.
Thus, when a group of researchers
from the SUNY College of
Environmental Science and Forestry
at Syracuse, USA characterised a
new frog species, the Atlantic Coast
leopard frog (Rana kauffeldi), on the
Atlantic coast of the USA with months
Current Biology 29, R265–R279, April 22, 2019
of field work and 2,000 surveys of
frog calls, with numerous researchers
and field assistants, they highlighted
their hands-on approach with a
photo of a frog on the hand of one
of the researchers (PLoS One (2018)
13, e0205805). Most researchers,
however, are more likely to touch their
touchscreens than a real live frog.
Through the touchscreen
The history of technology could
equally be described as a history
of reducing the importance of
touching things. From moving tools
manually, humans have progressed
first to pushing buttons that start a
mechanism, and now to shouting at
virtual assistants without touching
anything at all.
As the writer Gaby Hinsliff noted in
The Guardian in 2014: “I increasingly
notice the disappearance of small
ways in which humans used to
engage tangibly and effortfully with
their world but now don’t; a growing
physical distance between people and
stuff.” Mechanical motions that were
no burden at all, like winding up a
watch, have already become extinct.
Handwriting, Hinsliff fears, is set to
follow, although she feels that taking
notes by hand helps her memory, and
she can back this up with a scientific
study (Psychol. Sci (2014) https://doi.
org/10.1177/0956797614524581).
R267

Hands on: Recreating human hands with proprioception and a soft, controlled touch is one of the
big challenges for robotics. (Photo: © Michael Gross.)
As technology learns to respond to
our speech and may move on to read
our thoughts in the next step, there is
a fundamental disconnect and loss of
understanding from the human side.
While everybody can look at a bicycle
or a mechanical typewriter and figure
out how it works, there are few people,
if anybody, who understand how
their smartphone works on all levels
from the hardware to the latest apps
they uploaded. It is one of the many
ironies of the evolution of 21st century
technology that we refer to the interface
that most efficiently stops us from
touching things as the touchscreen.
To a certain extent, and especially in
fields where it is already obvious that
people miss the experience of touching
and being touched, commercial
ventures are bound to fill the void
with suitable offers from professional
hugging through to hands-on
experiences and courses in traditional
artisan skills like woodworking. In the
long term, the touch experiences of
earlier times may not be lost but will
just end up being commodified.
Their importance is also highlighted
by the fact that robotics researchers are
already busy teaching their machines
how to do a gentle touch. The re-
touch lab (http://re-touch-lab.com/)
at the University of California at Santa
R268 Current Biology 29, R265–R279, April 22, 2019
Barbara, USA, led by Yon Visell, for
instance, conducts interdisciplinary
research into the unique capabilities
of the human hand, with a view to
mimicking it as closely as possible in
soft-tissue robotics.
Challenges include proprioception
(knowing where your fingers are)
and the very sensitive fine control
of movements guided by multiple
inputs. In the case of string players,
for instance, the finger placement is
guided with exquisite precision by the
sound the musicians imagine within
their head, while also being constrained
by the tactile sensation. Recreating that
kind of multimodal magic in a machine
may still be some way off.
In the long term, however, the risk is
that normal touch, like most mechanical
work, will be relegated to machines.
Business will be quick to turn all the
touch experiences into commodities
priced as a luxury. Before we lose touch
with our world, now may be the last
chance to remember that our sense of
touch is not only natural and human
but also one of our most important
interfaces with other humans and with
the real world.
Michael Gross is a science writer based at
Oxford. He can be contacted via his web page
at www.michaelgross.co.uk
Current Biology
Magazine
Q&A
Stanley Heinze
Stanley Heinze is an Associate
Professor in the Lund Vision Group at
Lund University in southern Sweden.
He started his group in 2015 after
a two-year postdoc in Lund and a
preceding three-year postdoc at the
University of Massachusetts, USA.
Originally from Germany, he received
a Diploma degree in Biology at the
University of Marburg, where he also
carried out his PhD studies. Ever
since his first degree, he has been
working on the neurophysiology and
neuroanatomy of the insect central
complex, especially in the context of
navigation and orientation behaviors.
His main focus of work at the moment
is to compare the structure–function
relationships within this central
decision-making center of the brain
across a range of species and
correlating behavioral strategies and
sensory environments with the neural
circuitry of the central complex on the
level of single neurons.
What turned you on to biology
in the first place? Way back at
school, in fifth grade, when asked
what I wanted to be when I grew
up, I answered that I would like to
become a scientist. But I was actually
much more interested in drawing
and painting at the time, and with
my dad being a construction worker
my plan soon changed and I wanted
to become an architect. At the very
last moment, during my final year at
school, an amazing Biology teacher
helped me to rediscover my interest
in the natural world. After doing my
undergrad studies in Biology at the
University of Marburg in Germany, I
went to Australia for a year to study
at the Northern Territory University in
Darwin, essentially to find inspiration
and to decide in which direction
I wanted to move. Far from home
and with a lot of time at my disposal
for reading, I stumbled across a
rather battered copy of Horace
Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day
of Creation, a history of the early
days of molecular biology. This
book got me really hooked. It made
a big impression on me as a young
student, mostly because it showed