magic of touch

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I love the magic of social media and virtual friends but nothing beats real life hugs from live friends to promote comfort & joy. There is nothing better when stressed or ill than a professional massage or even a bit of a rub from someone who cares. This equals the magic & healing power of touch.

“ How long has it been since someone touched part of you other than your body? ” Laurel Hoodwrit

I have only had one operation in hospital, that being having my appendix removed years ago. The following day I slowly remembered the trauma of being placed on the metal stretcher & other flashes through the fog of anesthetic. When the nurse came to give me a sponge bath, the relief & comfort I experienced were unbelievable alongside the pain that I was experiencing as the drugs wore off. It gave me an appreciation of how human touch can change our experience of life in an extremely positive way. I read an informative article about the research that was done on monkeys in the 1950′s called ‘The Sense of Touch and How It Affects Development’ by Crystal Leonard:

Through its effect on the development of neuronal pathways and communication, the amount and type of touch an individual receives can greatly affect that person’s behavior and health. Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, psychologists and doctors have discovered that affectionate touch is necessary for the physical, mental, and emotional development of children. For example, doctors throughout the first half of the twentieth century were puzzled by a phenomenon called failure to thrive syndrome. In hospitals and orphanages the majority of infants and children did not develop normally and/or died, despite being given proper medical care, good food, and a clean environment (Hatfield).
During the nineteen fifties the psychologist Harry Harlow conducted studies of the effects of isolation on infant monkeys. He separated monkeys at birth from their parents and siblings, keeping them in clean cages with adequate food. He then put two “surrogate” mothers in the cages. One was a wire mother with a milk bottle and one was a wooden mother covered in terrycloth without a milk bottle. The infant monkeys clung desperately onto the terrycloth mothers for hours, ignoring the desire for food in exchange for the softness of the terry cloth (Hatfield). This demonstrates that the desire for touch is stronger than any other desire, and implies that mother-infant bonding is more dependent on affectionate touch than on the fact that the mother provides food to the infant.
The touch deprived monkeys in Harlow’s studies all experienced stereotypic abnormalities in their development and behavior. These monkeys engaged in self-clasping and rocking behaviors and were disinterested in their environment. They avoided socializing with other monkeys, were timid, and disliked being touched. When they did interact with other monkeys they were very aggressive. They had difficulty finding sexual partners, often were unable to mate properly, and abused their mates and offspring (Hatfield). In the years since Harlow’s studies of monkeys others have conducted further studies on the affect of touch deprivation on development. The current consensus is that adequate affectionate touch is necessary for an individual’s proper development.
There is strong evidence that a lack of affectionate touch causes depression, violence, memory deficits, and illness. The question is how something as simple as touch can affect one’s body so greatly. One possibility, referred to as Attachment Theory, has to do with the relationship between affectionate touch and parent-child bonding (Hatfield). If a child does not receive adequate affectionate touch because his or her parents are emotionally neglectful, then the child and parents will not form a proper emotional bond. The lack of bonding will, consciously or unconsciously, cause unhappiness and a lack of trust on the child’s part. As a child grows older this will manifest itself as an inability to relate to other people, which will cause further unhappiness and stress. This theory has definite merit, but it does not provide a clear cause and effect for touch deprivation and abnormal development. More research is needed to backup the claims of this theory.
Another possible explanation for the effects of touch on behavior and health focuses specifically on the relationship between touch and stress. Affectionate touch lowers an individual’s stress and anxiety levels, while touch deprivation raises stress levels (Hatfield). With stress comes an increase in the levels of stress hormones, such as cortisol and norepinephrine, in the blood. Chronically high levels of cortisol prevent normal brain tissue development in children and damage existing brain tissue, especially the hippocampus (Field). The hippocampus is involved in memory and learning, so this might explain why children who do not receive affectionate touch experience learning difficulties.

“Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.” Hannah Arendt

And now they have discovered that what we touch also colors our experience as per Businessweek post What You Touch May Make You a ‘Softie’ or Play ‘Hard Ball’:

A third experiment by the Yale team found that people who’d handled rough jigsaw puzzle pieces were more likely to describe an interaction between two people as adversarial, compared to folks who’d first handled smooth pieces.
And a 2008 study by the same team showed that people were more likely to judge strangers as warm and trustworthy if they (the observers) were also holding a warm drink at the time.
There may be some lessons here for helping to get things to go your way, Bargh said.
“Someone said the best way to negotiate is to give a hot cup of coffee and sit them in a soft chair,” he said. “The warmth helps them trust you, the soft chair will make the negotiator more yielding.”

Also in Time Study: how things you touch influence the way you think:

“Touch remains perhaps the most under appreciated sense in behavioral research,” said co-author Christopher Nocera, a graduate student in Harvard’s department of psychology, in a statement. “Our work suggests that greetings involving touch, such as handshakes and cheek kisses, may in fact have critical influences on our social interactions, in an unconscious fashion.”

But an older New York Times post was really interesting The Experience of Touch: Research Points to a Critical Role By Daniel Goleman:

Because mammals depend on maternal care for survival in their early weeks or months, the prolonged absence of a mother’s touch – more than 45 minutes in a rat, for instance – triggers a slowing of the infant’s metabolism, and thus a lowering of its need for nourishment. Such a reaction heightens its chances of surviving until it is once again in contact with the mother.
While the slower metabolism is beneficial in the short term, it stunts growth if very prolonged. According to Dr. Schanberg, part of the response in rats, which includes huddling down and becoming still, is a change in metabolism that conserves the store of energy and slows the rate of growth. The mother’s touch, however, reverses the process, so that growth resumes at normal rates.
People differ, however, in the intensity of physical contact they find comfortable. While some of the difference may be an innate property of the person’s nervous system, some of it may be shaped by the experience of being touched or not being touched.
Work in rats by Marion Diamond, a professor of anatomy at the University of California at Berkeley, showed that those who had more tactile experience had better-developed nerve cells in the area of the cortex that processes the sensations of touch. Lack of that experience, however, led to a decrease of the richness of connection and size of those brain cells.
”People who touch little, as opposed to those who like to cuddle,” Dr. Diamond said, ”probably experience the same effect. Those who have had little physical contact over the years might become hypersensitive to such touch, so that they found it physically uncomfortable.”

It makes me wonder whilst we spend more of our time online and not in physical contact (touch) with our friends & family, how is this affecting us a society???? Will we become autistic as a society & culture? I guess the effects will not be seen until down the line, hopefully not too late? What do you think?