Touching And Being Touched: Much More Than A Biological Need

Touching and being touched by the people we love is more than just a biological need. It’s part of our language, it’s nurturing emotional needs and validating affection, erasing fears and receiving a lot of oxytocin as a gift.

Letting all of this lack not only creates a hunger for human contact, but also causes stress to increase and even physical discomfort to appear more often or more strongly.

The skin is our most extensive sensory organ. Touch, in turn, is the first sense we acquire along with smell.

We also know that practices such as skin-to-skin contact with babies (especially those born prematurely) favor the somatosensory development of their brains, also optimizing their cognitive, perceptual, social and physical development.

Human beings, as with other animals, need this contact, and not only in the early stages of life.

Something that has already been observed is that in many nursing homes where the elderly receive hugs, affection and this physical contact that is related to gestures of affection, they show an improvement in their attention and communication processes. In addition, they feel less tired and their joint pain is also reduced.

Our brains need this kind of contact (always provided by people who are significant to us) to find that emotional balance that favors a state of psychological calm.

Now, science is discovering even more processes associated with touch that we didn’t know about until recently. Let’s see more data below.

Touching and being touched: much more than a biological need

People need to touch and be touched to communicate feelings, to help, to receive and give comfort… We’ve known this for a long time, and science has also shown us these facts empirically over the past few years. Now, there’s an even more interesting aspect.

• Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana (USA), could see through a study that we are able to perceive emotions through touch.
• The experiment was carried out in 2009. A group of 248 people with both eyes blindfolded received touches and caresses from strangers for 5 seconds.

• As incredible as it may seem, 75% of these men and women were able to identify the concern, fear, sadness, anger, sympathy and even happiness of the person who was touching.

This work attracted so much attention that, later, the experiment was carried out again at the University of Miami. Dr. Tiffany Field, director of the Tactile Research Institute at the University of Miami, reached the following conclusions.

We have the ability to send, receive and interpret emotional signals through touch

A physiotherapist uses his hands not only as a work tool; through them, he can also feel worries, tensions, adverse emotions that intensify contractures.

In turn, these expert hands not only improve mobility and relieve pain. They also have a wonderful ability to convey well-being to us.

The authors of this study emphasize the need to deepen it, repeating it with a larger sample of the population. In fact, this is already being done in countries like Spain and the UK. However, with this first step we can already establish some hypotheses:

• The need to touch and be touched goes beyond offering affection. Evolutionarily, we also acquire the ability to read the emotional state of others through touch. Something like this allows us, mainly, to offer relief through a hug or a caress to the one who suffers.

The primary somatosensory cortex and its participation in the processing of touch

Until not long ago neurologists thought that the somatosensory cortex only allowed us to decode characteristics as basic as knowing whether a surface is smooth or rough, whether its temperature is cold or cold…

Now, as we advance in understanding the sense of touch, we discover that it is also linked to emotions.

This area of ​​our brain is also linked to social and emotional components. For example, it helps us to notice tension or worry in our children and seek their closeness to hug them. Through this contact, we offer comfort, security and affection.

Michael Spezio, a psychologist at Scripps College and author of this study, shows us that touching is not just a physical experience, it is an emotional experience and a type of language. It is a mechanism through which we can understand the other and respond without the need for words.

The language of touch, a power within our reach

We often hear it said that never again does a person have as many sensory experiences through touch as when he was a child. That’s because cultural factors and the way we’re brought up facilitate or slow down – but generally slow down – our ability to maintain this kind of communication through cuddling and hugging into adulthood.

It is even known that sports team players use touch (a touch, a hug, a pat on the back in congratulations) to support themselves in a given moment of celebration or encouragement in the face of a difficulty between teammates.

These are times when it is necessary to use something more intense than a word. It works. Recovering and enhancing this type of language is, therefore, essential.

Because touching and being touched goes far beyond a biological need. It is a social foundation that allows us to improve our emotional universe.