Affectionate touch

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Claudia Hammond looks at the neuroscience behind our sense of touch. Why does a gentle touch from a loved one make us feel good? This is a question that neuroscientists have been exploring since the late 1990's, following the discovery of a special class of nerve fibres in the skin. There seems to be a neurological system dedicated to sensing and processing the gentle stroking you might receive from a parent or lover or friend, or that a monkey might receive from another grooming it. Claudia talks to neuroscientists Victoria Abraira, Rebecca Bohme, Katerina Fotopoulou and Francis McGlone who all investigate our sense of emotional touch, and she hears from Ian Waterman who lost his sense of touch at the age of eighteen.

Transcript

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1:00.0	Hello and welcome to Discovery from the BBC I'm Claudia Hammond back with the next
1:05.3	episode of The Anatomy of Touch. So far in this series we've heard a lot about
1:10.3	what the results of a huge online study the touch test can tell us about the psychological
1:15.7	and social aspects of touching. But today I want to explore the neurobiology of touch. We've heard that interpersonal touch can be good for us
1:25.2	when done safely of course, but what is actually happening in the skin when we feel
1:30.1	the touch of another human being and how is that interpreted by the brain.
1:34.7	Until relatively recently we didn't even know that the body has a special system
1:40.2	just to give us pleasure from the kind of touch that binds us together as humans, known as effective touch.
1:47.0	So now there are new frontiers of research opening up for a sense that has been somewhat neglected.
1:53.0	For every 100 research papers on vision,
1:57.0	there's one on touch.
	...

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