Touché
A sudden gust of icy wind brushed her, and there were goose bumps all over, as the tiny bits of hair on her arms stood up in unison. “Touché”, he said. He promptly took her hands in his - tiny like a baby’s, and cold as ice. Slowly they warmed up as blood rushed into their extremities, their hearts palpitating. She smiled, the red color returning to her lips …Sorry to interrupt at such a crucial juncture, but this is not a romantic story. I was just trying to illustrate the human sensitivity to touch. And I think I have made my point. So, we shall return to this story some other day if I am in the mood.
Touch is one of the five senses, perhaps the most interesting and essential of all. It is the first of the senses to develop in the embryonic stage, and it lasts the longest, until we die. It’s the most common form of sensory perception in land animals. We can sense temperature (relative), pressure, vibrations, texture, pain or pleasure among other things. Throughout life people use their sense of touch to learn, protect themselves from harm, relate to others, and experience pleasure. Even for the movement of our body, the muscles, tendons and bones, require a kind of internal tactile sensing called proprioception.
The skin covers the entire body, and is bundled with neuroreceptors or nerve endings. The density of nerve endings under the skin in an area determines it sensitivity. The more sensitive areas are fingertips, neck, face, tongue, lips and the genitalia. The least sensitive is the middle of the back (surprised?). There are different kind of receptors – thermo-, mechano-, chemo- and pain (nocicepters), for diverse stimuli.
You can gather all the above information by looking it up on Google or Wikipedia. You might also learn some fancy terms like somatosensory system and postcentral gyrus in the parietal lobe (part of the brain where all the sensory signals related to touch are processed and feedback is generated). Why did I include it then, do you ask? I spent an entire evening reading and making notes on it. So didn’t want to delete it. I will fish out some more sense-ational facts later if you are interested (got that from a website too!). But what I want to talk about here is how I “see” touch, if such a term is acceptable. (Darn it if it’s not. I will use it regardless.)
I am quite “touchy”, literally and figuratively. I mean, I believe I am quite sensitive - to touch. I am wary about physical contact with people I don’t know well. I usually get a weird feeling down my spine if I hold someone’s hand, especially if it’s a girl’s (which might also be because very few girls are kind enough to let me hold their hand). Thankfully, I am not ticklish, or all hell would have broken loose. But for me, touch is like an acknowledgment of trust. So if I allow you to kick me, you are assured that I trust you completely!
However, this is not about me either. It’s about how I perceive touch. Let’s start with the movie “Hitch”, the iconic Will Smith – Eva Mendes starrer. What I took back from the movie was – “60 % of all human communication is body language (non – verbal)”. Of course eyes and pheromones constitute a part of that 60 % too. But I shall consider eyes separately, they are my favourite human organ, can’t reveal everything I know about them so easily. Oops already spilled some beans! So, anyway, touch and other body gestures constitute more than half of our regular communication. Makes me question - why the hell do I read so much!
So we have sort of established that we interact through touch quite regularly. And yet we are not conscious of it most of the time as we are of our vision, hearing, taste or smell. Perhaps it’s the most instinctive of the senses and doesn’t require consciousness. An infant knows its mother’s touch, the softness of her breasts, the warmth of her bosom, even before it is born or has opened its eyes. He or she get their first lessons by touching and holding things, thus learning about the environment and bonding with people. Children love being held in someone’s arms or sitting on an elder’s lap. They are happy to be caressed and tickled. They are not so happy to be bathed though. Perhaps they have had enough of it for nine months inside the womb? Children that don’t get motherly affection (majority of which is through touch), are more prone to psychological disorders. Yes, this has been proved by experiments on monkeys!
As we grow up we learn to differentiate between different kinds of touch – cold and hot, rough and smooth, soft and hard, pain and pleasure. Also the more subtle behavioural ones - a warm hug, an angry shove, a cold handshake, a nervous dance. But as we learn more, we also become more apprehensive about touch. We don’t want to run into mother’s arms anymore, we don’t want to be called mama’s pet. We want to be grown up, independent. We tend to suppress and forget our instincts, our true feelings, trying to conform with the outer world. And yet touch remains the purest form of expression. Every relationship's rests on the outcome of the first kiss (or is it overrated?). Happy partners are those who like to be around each other and have a good sex life. When we are down, nothing lifts one up more than a friendly pat on the back or an assuring embrace (better if it’s a girl!). Sick people, or people under stress all like the comfort of a helping, tending hand. Evelyn Glennie, a partially deaf percussionist says that she can listen from her whole body, not just her ears. She can feel the music with her hands and feet, her face. She doesn’t wear shoes during a performance. I wonder why she doesn’t play in the nude though.
In India, people are a little nasal about public display of affection. We would rather fold hands in a namaste rather than shake hands or hug each other. Is it our way of avoiding infection I wonder? And yet it’s a custom to touch the feet of our elders. Holding hands is looked down upon; walking in each other’s arms is outright criminal. It depicts that we are still primitive in these respects, we need to grow up.
So my suggestion is – spread the word, touch and be touched! Not in a lecherous or perverse way though. Do it in an uninhibited, human way without any preconditions (much like that Free Hug campaign!). Let yourself be free; spread the wonder of human touch. Don't force it on anyone, and don't go overboard either, be gentle. And feel the difference it makes to you.
Now since you have read all of this, here are some fun (or not so fun) facts:
• What's the largest organ of your body? You may be surprised to find out it is your skin. The skin makes up about 15% of your body weight - if you weigh 100 pounds, 15 of those pounds come from your skin. Measured in surface area, the skin averages 20 square feet in adults.
• Skin is constantly renewing itself, which is a good thing since you shed 50 million skin cells every day - that's about 30,000 to 40,000 skin cells every minute.
• The human tongue has a high density of nerve endings, so if you bite it, you feel sharp and intense pain (although you hardly lose blood). However, it has very few thermoreceptors, so you tend to burn your mouth while drinking something hot, if you don’t feel it with your lips
touching:)
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