Science Friday Podcast Recap: How Touch Helps Us Emotionally Experience the World

Touch is perhaps one of the most underrated of the five senses and is only regarded when one encounters a radical sensation thereof, touching something extremely hot or cold. Researchers have recently found a connection between the set of nerves that respond to touching something soft and social cues. Liverpool-based researcher commented on the discrepancies amongst the ways that one responds to touching something. There are many different receptors, for example, that respond to different surfaces with which one’s skin comes into contact. They allow someone to not see the world but rather feel the world. It has been known for a long time that there are different microphones of sorts in the skin that detect mechanical stimulation. The portion of the skin that most quickly responds to touching is of course the hands that send messages of the brain processing the touch in record time allowing a person to feel what their hand touches instantaneously. This, quite literally but also figuratively, prevents things from slipping through our fingers - these things not only being feeling itself but also the emotions that are corresponsive to touch.