Why does a cold pool feel warmer the second time you put your toes in?

Why does a person who's trying to break into a safe run his fingers over sandpaper?

Would it be great or not so great if you couldn't feel any physical pain? Why does

stubbing your toe have different sensations through time? Why do Mediterranean cultures touch

each other more while they're talking than Scandinavian cultures? And what does this have to do with

cuddle puddles or why

NBA players bump chests or why puppies sleep in dog piles?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply

into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is a love story about our sense of touch, what it is, how it works, and why it plays

such a critical role in our lives. So let me start with an acquaintance of mine who many years ago

worked as a midnight phone operator

at AT&T. He would get calls from people in the middle of the night and he'd say,

hello, this is AT&T. How can I help you? And they would say, hi. And he'd say, what can I help you

with? And they'd say, I just need someone to talk with so there's a lot

of loneliness in the world now I tend to be suspicious when people talk about problems as modern

phenomenon given that most things have a deep history but an increase in loneliness might actually be

something new.

If you look back even just a century ago,

people lived in boarding houses with lots of other people,

and there was lots of intergenerational living

...