Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #45 Touch – The Forgotten Sense with Professor Francis McGlone

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

“Touch is not just a sentimental human indulgence, it’s a biological necessity”   Did you know that being touched is essential for healthy brain development? Yet with teachers, healthcare professionals and work colleagues being increasingly hesitant about social touching, for the first time in the evolution of human history, many of us are being exposed to less touch than ever before. But what effect is all this having on our emotional health? World-leading researcher Professor Francis McGlone explains the importance of touch for humans and the devastating consequences of not receiving it. The research in this area is mind-blowing and learning about it has changed the way I interact with my family. I hope you find this conversation useful. I dedicate a chapter of my new book ‘The Stress Solution’ to touch, which is available to order on Amazon now. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/touch Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I mean that's our primary role as scientists is to pull back the curtains of ignorance and we really need to get this story out there. This isn't some hippie hugger hoodie type of thing that Cameron was going on about. This is a fundamental necessity in that developing brain to have close physical contact with the carer. Hi, my name is Dr Rangan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of The Four Pillar Plan and television presenter. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people,

both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome to episode 45 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. Now, as a practicing doctor, low energy is one of the commonest complaints that I see in my practice. And for that reason, I've created a free six-part video series to help you increase your energy so that you can get more out of your life. to help you increase your energy so that you can get more out of your life.

If this sounds of interest to you and you would like to watch these free videos, you can sign up to receive them at drchastity.com forward slash energy. Today's guest is one of the world's leading researchers in the field of human touch, Professor Francis McGlone. In today's conversation, we talk about how important human touch is for our physical and emotional well-being, and how we have undervalued this as a society. We're told these days that we're living ultra-connected lives, and that may be true in the digital sense, but if we talk about deep, meaningful human connection, in many ways, we're more isolated than ever before. Society is becoming more fragmented as we move away from our communities, our families and our support networks. Loneliness is on the rise.

And for the first time in the evolution of human history, many of us have been exposed to less touch than ever before. My conversation with Francis is a fascinating one and we discuss how touch is one of the most undervalued senses that simply doesn't get the same amount of attention and airtime as sight, vision or our sense of smell. I think today's conversation is a really important one. I enjoyed having it and I hope you enjoy listening. is a really important one. I enjoyed having it and I hope you enjoy listening. Before we get started, I do need to give a very quick shout out to our sponsors who are essential in order for me to be able to put out weekly podcast episodes like this one. Athletic Greens continue their support of my podcast and whilst I prefer that people get all of their nutrition from foods, I recognize that for some

of us it is not always possible. Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I've come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics and digestive enzymes. If you're looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation.

So Francis, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank you, Ron again. It's great to have you here. We're currently in my house. Francis, you've very kindly driven over to record this in my living room, which is fantastic. Francis, you've very kindly driven over to record this in my living room, which is fantastic. Now, I thought we might start with something that I've seen you quoted as saying before. I've also used this quote in my book on the chapter on touch, which you were very instrumental in helping me write that. And you've said that touch is not just a sentimental human indulgence.

It's a biological necessity. What do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is what our research and others have shown is that the interaction between two species is really only mediated initially by some mechanical sense, yes, which we call touch. A particular aspect of touch that I was meaning in that statement was there's a system of nerve fibres, these are sensory nerve fibres in the skin of all social mammals

which have evolved specifically to respond to that affiliative contact between one animal and another. These aren't the touch nerves that you're instinctively aware of. There's a different class of nerve fibres mediates the fact that someone touches you. That is called the fast touch system. And that fast touch basically lets you know if something slipping through your fingers or an animal or flies landed on your skin. This touch that we're talking about is mediated by a special class of nerve fibers called C fibers. And C fibers have

a number of specific properties, one of which is their slow conduction. So information that comes along a C-fiber takes a second or two to get into the brain. It therefore can't have any immediate discriminative function. So what's it doing? Why do we have a class of nerve fibers in the skin touch sensitive slowly contacting c fibers that respond to gentle stroking touch and that's really been a passionate interest of mine for over 20 years now when i first read a paper by a swedish neurophysiologist orca valbo who'd first discovered these nerve fibers in human skin wow i mean we first met Francis, didn't we? Maybe not even a couple of years back when I was recording, filming a BBC One documentary series, and we came to your lab

in John Moores University. I remember being blown away by what you were telling me. In fact, what you taught me on that filming session actually immediately impacted the way that I interact with my kids from that very evening which is you know I've got to give you a lot of credit for and say thank you to you for that and we'll come to that throughout this conversation okay um but you know right at the start here when we're talking about touch okay I think it's possibly one of the most undervalued senses i think i undervalued the importance of touch until i've spoken to you yeah um so i think we should talk about why it's so undervalued and why it's so important but then also when you talk

about touch there's various different kinds of touch aren't there and i think we need to be very clear what we're talking about yes i mean the point i was just making is that there are really two types of touch there's the fast immediate touch that you experience when something or somebody touches you and most of the research into what's called somatosensation so this area of science is called somatosensation somato is body and sensation is obvious most of somatosensory research has really focused on fast touch and particularly fast touch receptors that are in the digits of the hand. If you like, the hand is seen as our faveur of the visual system. The hand is where we explore the outside world.

We manipulate tools. We do fine crafts with the hand. So a fair amount is known about the touch receptors in the skin of the palm of the hand but right in large the touch sensitivity is across the whole body and the rest of the body hasn't really taken that much research interest compared to the the digits and they are complicated enough by the way a lot of virtual reality systems and haptic systems now are trying to understand you know how the human hand does its magic in terms of discriminating fine textures you know even

screwing a bolt onto a nut or you know and that's what we think about when when we're talking about touch we're thinking about oh you know when i when i touch my my cup of tea like we've both got a cup of tea here yeah um we know if it's too hot that's what we're using touch for but your your research is suggesting that that's not the only purpose of touch well actually that's a very important point actually that i think also helps to sort of communicate that these what these two types of touch are the palm of the hand has skin that's called glabrous skin now there's only really a couple of body parts that have glabrous skin. Now, there's only really a couple of body parts that have glabrous skin,

and that's the palm of the hand and the soles of the feet and, to some extent, the lips. Now, these skin surfaces are all about exploring the outside world. So let's just focus on the palm of the skin of the hand. That skin is always looking at understanding things that are outside of you. Handling an object, picking up a cup of tea, doing some craft work, all of that touch from the glabrous skin of the hand is really dealing with the outside world. You're interacting with objects.

The skin of the rest of the body, now that's me. When touch is delivered to that part of my body, Now that's me. When touch is delivered to that part of my body, there's a very different response in terms of my appreciation of why that touch has been delivered. And it would normally be in an affiliative or reassuring kind of way. These C-fibers that we're talking about today, these touch-sensitive C-fibers, have never been found in the glabrous skin of the hand. So the anatomy is telling us something. The wiring of this system must give us a clue as to function. Why are these C-tactile fibres, these fibres that respond to pleasant touch, not present in the hand? Well, that's because we think the hand is dealing with the outside world.

The only place we've found the C-tactile afferents is in the hairy skin of the body, i.e. if you stroke your forehead or you give yourself a stroke, that's where the C-tactile fibres are, not in the tool that's delivering that touch, which is your hand, which is a really interesting problem, actually, when you self-touch. So actually, the word touch, in many ways, is almost too simplistic, isn't it because it we're putting it all under one umbrella yes it's an inadequate term for the complexity of touch yeah and so there's many different kinds of touch i like that about the hands you know that's what we probably use to

to sort of orientate ourselves see if you know i guess if i don't know if we if we had no vision for our argument you know if something had happened we had no vision for our argument, you know, if something had happened, we had no vision, we'd probably use that to look for danger. Absolutely. Blind people become very, very adept at using their palm and skin of the hand to explore the world around. The classic, of course, is Braille. You know, the blind person can read Braille quicker than a visual person can read text. These people are incredible. Is that true?

Absolutely. I worked with a group in Glasgow, a girl who was blind from birth, so congenitally blind, and she was trained on Braille. I did a project on the hand. I spoke to this girl and watched her actually reading a Braille little computer she had, and the speed with which she was reading that

that braille text was phenomenal so what does that tell us okay so i know we're going off on a slight tangent but i think it's relevant so someone who's blind can use these touch receptors on their hands in the digits yeah in the digits and the fingers to read faster than we can if we could actually see and read yeah absolutely i mean well again that's an indication of how important these discriminative touch receptors are in the digits you know pianist a violinist you know a craftsman the exquisite complexity of these they're called low threshold mechanoreceptors so these little microphones if you like to look at them that way in the digits are basically encoding all of those physical

properties of touching something and with braille these raised dots have to be detected by some array of sensors and these array of sensors are in the digit tips and we know a reasonable amount about how they encode the spatial information that you get when a blind person is reading Braille. Now, of course, that system has to be fast. Now, that speed of transmission to the central nervous system is dependent upon a fatty sheath around these nerve fibres called myelin. And what myelin does is a biophysical trick, but basically it allows electrical information

to travel to the brain in milliseconds. Of course, that's why a braille reader can actually read very quickly is that the speed of transmission of those nerve impulses into the central nervous system is faster than a formula one racing car you know it's two or three hundred kilometers per second so when someone touches you a myelinated fast nerve lets you know instantaneously that somebody has touched you arcing back to these c-tactile fibers they don't have that property yeah they the information that comes in along a c-fiber is only going to get into the nervous system in about a meter per second so that's a lot slower oh it could take a second or two for that information to get into your brain the important point is of course again

getting back to the anatomy is why is there a slow system there in the first place what possible function can it have remember we haven't found it in the glabrous skin of the hand we only find it in the hairy skin of the body well that's where you're stroked that's where you're caressed that's where you're hugged that's where this nerve fiber is and that was the beginning of our insight into the fact that this c-tactile afferent is playing a fundamental role in nurture and bonding and affiliative touch and it's present in every social mammal that we so far look at so so we've got broadly speaking two kinds of touch fiber one one is very fast that tells us when we're being touched that's the one we're

talking about with if blind people are reading braille very quickly that's the one that they're using but the bulk of your research has been on the slower nerve network of touch which is the c-tactile afferents um or i mean for the purpose of this podcast i guess we can call them ct afferents maybe just to cts cts okay so these are the slower touch fibers that don't really tell us necessarily where things are anatomically around us. No. But what are they doing then? What is this slow network of touch fibers doing? Why is it there? Well, that's been really the main focus of my research and my colleagues in Sweden for the last 20-odd years, is functionally characterizing what are these nerve fibers for. Now, one way in neuroscience that we always try and establish the functional properties of the brain is looking at ablation or stimulation.

We learned a lot about the brain after the First and Second World War with soldiers coming back with brain injuries. And when the brain is injured, you then begin to see, well, what did that part of the brain contribute to? And you begin to understand how bits of the brain are actually involved in various aspects of emotion and behavior. And there's been some classic examples of how we've understood how critical the various parts of the brain are in terms of our function the classic one is phineas gage this railway worker in the late 19th century who basically drove a spike through his forehead while he was tamping dynamite down when they were building a railway in cavendish um in Vermont. And this spike was a metre long. It went through the base of his skull,

the base of his face, out through the top of his skull, and it removed the last part of his frontal lobes. At that stage, nobody had really known where the seat of emotional control was, but this God-fearing Christian, who was a pillar of society in Cavendish, turned into an absolute sort of, not deranged monster, but he was an alcoholic.

He would drink a lot, he would cuss a lot. He basically changed his personality. And the link here is that the prefrontal cortex was damaged by this particular accident that changed his personality. And that gave us an insight into how the frontal lobes are so important in regulating and controlling behavior. Now, in a similar route, looking at ablation, i.e. damage to the nervous system, we've worked with a couple of very rare patients

who've lost all of their fast touch nerves. One of these patients lives in the United Kingdom. These fast nerves, just to be clear, these are the ones which are on our digits, on our hands. These are the ones that are not, yeah, but they're everywhere, by the way. Although the densest population of the fast nerve fibre low-threshold mechanoreceptors are in the fingers, they're all over the body. You get them everywhere.

Because you'd feel somebody touching you on the back immediately, so there's fast nerve fibers there, but the densest populations are in the digits and the lips, by the way. So you had a patient where they didn't have these fast nerve fibers. Yeah, these patients suffered a condition called a neuronopathy, and the neuronopathy basically damaged below the neck all of the fast nerve fibers. Now, these fast nerve fibers don't just subserve touch on the body they're found in the muscles as well so they and the joints so they

they feed this this aspect of touch called proprioception so if you close your eyes and move your arm around you know exactly where your arm is in space again because there are touch receptors in the muscles and the joints, again mediated by fast-conducting myelinated nerve fibers that let you know where your body is. Now, Ian Walterman, who is the patient that we work with, and he doesn't mind his name being mentioned because he's been the subject of a couple of books by a colleague of mine, Jonathan Cole, a clinical neurophysiologist. Jonathan has no sense of touch below the neck. So if you touch Ian anywhere on his body, he doesn't feel a thing. And these patients, there are very few of them,

but they generally cannot move either because they have no idea where their body is in space because they have no sense of itself. If they were to pick up a pan in the kitchen... They have no idea they their body is in space because they have no sense of itself. If they were to pick up a pan in the kitchen. They have no idea they've picked it up. So can they do it? Would they do it by simply looking with their eyes and seeing it? Again, that's where Ian really became a very rare patient.

Although he had no sense of where his body was, he trained himself to contract the muscles that would allow him to pick up a cup or even to stand up. Without any knowledge that he's done it, he was able, after months and months of what he would call bloody-mindedness, managed to get up and walk without any knowledge that he was actually moving any of the muscles, the postural muscles that enabled him to walk. There's a book that Jonathan wrote, by the way, called Pride and a Daily Marathon, if you're interested, that explains how Ian Waterman took this phenomenal step to overcome the disability. I mean, Francis, can I say that it just sounds so incredible. It is. I'm just having this awareness of how much we are taking these

fast touch nerve fibers for granted absolutely every day to walk to make ourselves a cup of tea to to you know lift something up take the rubbish out anything we need i had no idea that we need these nerve fibers for everything absolutely and i think there is a there's a necessity really i mean again i think with ian walterman and again with these clinical populations you really only appreciate a sensory modality once you've lost it and there are very rare cases of people losing to sense well that's if we talk about you know senses the five senses let's say um i mean people talk about you know would you rather lose your eyesight or your hearing that's the that's the conventional two that you have to choose between that's right

or certainly that i've come across and we don't really think i don't think touch even gets a look in there actually that's a really good point i've often thought why am i so passionate about touch and taste will get a look in there it tastes tastes well, yeah, maybe smell, but touch. But touch will be right at the bottom of the five. I know, but getting back to why I'm interested in touch, I don't know whether there's a relationship here between when I first, my mother was an infant school teacher, and I remember coming home from work one day, and she'd always used to talk about what these kids were doing

and what she was doing with them. She, for some reason, asked this class of children, which sensory modality or which sense would they least like to lose? Firstly, every child said vision or hearing. One kid said touch. And when my mum told me that, I was only eight or nine years old, I suppose. That must have lodged somewhere in the back of my brain. What's that kid thinking about? Touch?

I mean, I found it quite extraordinary that a child of eight or nine would even recognise that this sense of touch was something that he or she, you know, would miss. But it is, you know, it is something that when you see patients like Ian, you see the disability that's actually mediated or caused by this lack of touch, particularly with proprioception and kinesthetic movement these are these patients although their motor systems are absolutely fine there's no damage to their motor nerves they cannot move because they have none of these fast uh marinated touch nerves now the other reason why the important thing about

this story is or the other important thing, is that the nerve fibers that are left undamaged in Ian Waterman are C-fibers. So these slower touch fibers. Absolutely. Now, Ian has done us an enormous favor in many ways by the fact that he's, here's our guinea pig. He's got no fast touch nerve fibers and all he has are C-fibers. is our guinea pig he's got no fast touch neurofibers and all he has are c-fibers now the classic c-fiber that most neuroscientists and physiologists and doctors know about is the c-fiber that encodes damage to the body surface and it's a nociceptor so for pain basically basically so

these neurofibers are c-fibers and they detect damage to the body so if you break a leg if you burn yourself that experience you get of pain is purely because there's a nerve fiber in the skin a c-fiber this has basically evolved to protect against injury now again getting back to our earlier discussion about there being two types of touch a fast touch and a slow touch, there are also two types of pain, a fast pain and a slow pain. And once again, the fast pain is mediated by myelinated nerves. That pain is, as you write in your book, if you pick up a hot pan off the stove, you'll drop it immediately because the fast pain system has protected you by saying, oh, you know, that's far too hot. Now, that pain is a pricking pain.

It's not, it doesn't last very long. It's just, oh, ow. If that pan was really hot, you then know that a second or two later, that emotional burning pain is going to come on and it could be there for another hour or two. That's the distinction. The first pain is just it's very

immediate it's very transitory it doesn't have any real emotional baggage to it it's just a get me out of here signal the second pain that comes on a couple of seconds later which we know is because it's a c-fiber it gives you all these emotional aspects of pain like a toothache like when you burn yourself or cut yourself deeply I think that's such a key point that yeah the first time I met you Francis I remember that point really you know making an impact on me um and I think I said to you I think I talk about this in the book as well actually is that when my daughter was a little bit younger if she would fall down she you know she'd trip up and you know she'd be a bit bamboozled and you know a bit annoyed she'd know something had happened but she wouldn't be crying straight away it's about three seconds later that the crying would

kick in and I remember you saying that this is the emotional quality to the pain and that's the key isn't it the there's something about just telling you what's happened or telling you, oh, you know, like you just mentioned, picking up a hot, oh, it's too hot. Right, you drop it. Okay, your body's been informed that there is a problem. You know, you've taken immediate action. But a few seconds later, there's an emotional quality. And that emotional quality you're saying is is sort of taken throughout the

body by these c-tactile nerve fibers that you've been studying for what 15 20 years absolutely these c-fibers are major property of these c-fibers that we see with pain and we see with touch is their emotional regulation they regulate emotional affective states so the touch is not just i don't mean to labor the point but i think it's i really want to make this clear to people that touch as you know it or as you think you know it may not be the only component of touch you know touch yes tells you what's going on with your skin and what's going on around you but touch has this other quality this emotional quality and i guess on a wider level that's one of your big concerns, isn't it?

That as we're becoming a touch-averse society, what implications is this having? Yes, I think really for the first time in the history of evolution, if you like, is that the interactive tactile experiences that we would naturally be getting, 50 to 30 years ago there are less opportunities for affiliative and social touch there's less physical play you know schools are having to sort of sell off their playing fields in order to sort of you know to sort of cover their costs there's less physical activity and more desk-based it-based activity where a child is interacting more with a smartphone or or an ipad than they are with with each other and this maybe it's early days yet but i think there's a consequence that's likely to sort of manifest in the fact that that lack of interactive touch you know through physical

play is possibly going to manifest itself at some stage later down through life where one is less resilient and we should probably talk about the importance of touch in early life experience in terms of arming the body against stress this c-tactile afferent is doing more than just encoding gentle touch it is playing a fundamental role in the way that the social brain is developing. And the social brain is what the brain is. And again, getting back to the ablation argument I mentioned earlier in neuroscience, we understand the function,

we see what happens when it's not there. A classic one with touch are the Romanian orphanage children that were discovered in the mid-1990s from Ceausescu's failed regime, where there were thousands of babies kept in orphanages. They were fed and watered, but they weren't touched. And all of those children, or the majority of those children, had severe behavioral and psychological problems. Once touch was re-engaged and they were put back into loving, caring caring families they normalized

to some extent what's happening here what is that developing brain basically missed out on a key developmental input neurodevelopmental input which would have been the nurturing touch that would have naturally occurred between the mother and the infant and my point here is that if that nerve fibre is not getting stimulated during development, the downstream consequences can be catastrophic throughout the life of that child. All of these children had some cognitive deficits that they will have to bear throughout their lives. So this nerve fibre is playing a far more fundamental role than we had initially understood it to be. It's now it's playing a role in the developing and shaping your sense of self. And this is getting quite tricky now, but your identity depends upon that recognition

that you have a you and that body that you have, we think, is imprinted, if you like, on that developing brain through this gentle touch system of nerves. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a many levels. It's thinking that, you know, there's many parents who listen to this podcast. Um, and you know, I've, I've got two young kids and, you know, when we, when we think about bringing up our children, a lot of us were thinking about, you know, we're trying to give them the right foods make sure that they're physically active um but potentially as a society we're not giving touch the importance that it deserves because what you're saying is that human touch close that sort of deep affectionate touch is necessary for the brain to develop optimally. Absolutely.

That's profound. It is profound. So what implications then, Francis, is it having that, let's say in countries like the United States, where, well, we can say two extremes here. My understanding of Scandinavia is that they very much prioritise the early years. So as a society, yes, they've got relatively high taxes, but they prioritise prioritize moms and dads being able to spend time with their children at a young age. That the state supports. The state supports that.

So society is saying, this is a priority. We're going to help you. We're probably somewhere in the middle, I'm guessing, here in the UK. We are, yeah. But the US seems to be pretty brutal, actually, in terms of I've heard stories of mums going back to work within two weeks of giving birth. I mean, I worked with research groups in America many years ago, and it still incenses me that because there's no maternity cover in North America, women who don't have all the wherewithal and the means will basically be handing their babies into care at eight to ten weeks and I'm sorry that I still it beggars belief that any advanced society would countenance that kind of behavior and of course from what we now understand about the role and function of the C-tactile afferents is that although that infant will get some kind of care

in the nursery it's been put into it is is not, I don't think ever, the adequate care that would come from that interaction with that baby's mother, particularly during that first two years of life. I think they are absolutely fundamental to the way that social brain develops. And this research that you've been carrying out, along with a few other researchers around the world, Francis, is it's got some pretty widespread implications because I suspect, and I don't know this for sure, but I would suspect that as American society was sort of developing and evolving, possibly they didn't know the importance of touch and affectionate touch particularly in the early years so arguably as your research becomes more widespread and people understand this more and more but perhaps you and your team can start to shift you know the sort of perception in society of how important touch is yes i mean that's our primary role as scientists is to pull back the curtains

of ignorance and we really need to get this story out there this isn't some hippie hugger you know hugger hoodie type of thing that Cameron was going on about this is a fundamental necessity in that developing brain to have close physical contact with the carer and the carer is of course is generally the mother and you know to some extent the father but there is more and more evidence now, particularly from animal research, and there's one example I think that translates perfectly to humans, is that there's an interesting area of genetics now called epigenetics. And epigenetics is the realisation or the recognition that the environment shapes the way certain genes are turned on and turned off.

that the environment shapes the way certain genes are turned on and turned off. And I think epigenetics, in some way, is replacing the old nurture-nature debate. Are you what your genes are, or does nurture play more of an impact in how you develop? Well, what epigenetics shows us, and the example I will use is from a researcher called Michael Meaney. And what Meaney was able to do, basically he worked on two different populations of rat mothers. You can identify rat mothers that lick and groom their pups a great deal, and you can identify a population of rat mothers who don't lick and groom their mothers.

Sorry, do not lick and groom their pups. Now, licking and grooming is touch. Meaney hadn't really initially recognised. Now, licking and grooming is touch. Meany hadn't really initially recognised that, but licking and grooming is touch. If you now look downstream at the pups from a high-licking, grooming mother and you look at the expression of stress regulatory systems in the brain, those rat pups as adults are absolutely capable of withstanding the stresses that would normally come about in any animal or human's life those pups from a low-licking grooming mother and you

mentioned this in your book had a red alert stress system they couldn't cope with with the you know the vagaries of life they were unable to regulate stressful uh now that of course is the seeding basis of a number of psychological and psychiatric disorders that could be traced back to the fact that early life adversity particularly through neglect is having this impact on the expression of of genes that basically regulate stress. This is so important. Yes. Essentially, that rat study, which you're saying has crossover to humans, is saying that basically if you're not touched enough in a loving, affectionate way as an infant,

that is going to impact how resilient you are to stress for the rest of your life. Absolutely. And in fact, if I go back to my ablation argument again, if we look at preterm infants, now preterm infants, we are now able to keep a preterm infant alive from 23, 24 weeks. Infants placed in an incubator, the major focus from neonatologists is to is to keep that infant alive so everything all the research and all the interventions are done to manage the gases

surfactants to clear the lungs basically keep that heart ticking over so that the infant stays alive which is all well and good but what has not been recognized and the focus of my research now is that 25 percent of those pre-term infants develop full-blown autism all of them to some extent will have some mild to severe cognitive deficit throughout their lives and what don't they get when they're in the incubator? They don't get touched. Now, I know a number of institutions now are engaging with the fact that the parent can sometimes go in and handle these babies, but I don't think as far as I know that it's predicated against an understanding of the neurobiological basis of touch.

And this C-tactile afferent that's the focus of our podcast today, Rongan, is that we've got some evidence from a study we've done in Italy at a neonatologist unit in Milan, where if these preterm infants are gently touched whilst in the incubator, that we get some positive indicators of improvement in that baby's development to the extent that they're generally discharged from the neonatal intensive care unit earlier than those babies that are not touched. So what we're looking to do now is to try and understand or test a hypothesis. If we can somehow

put that touch back into the preterm infant's incubator. During that two or three months when they're in the incubator, we hypothesise there will be a significant impact on the development of that baby's brain and ultimately its personality. So again, this link between touch and autism always gets people hysterical. I've had a whole load of negative press from the fact that this came about actually from psychiatrists in the 1950s, that children that had these displayed these signs of autism, the psychiatrist would blame the mother for the way that child was.

And then we get this term, the refrigerator mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. If this C-tactile system developmentally either is not operating properly or the baby has a postnatally depressed mother or we've got the Romanian orphanage situation where touch is not delivered during those critical first two years, we begin to see that there's a link now between that lack of early touch and that normally functioning social brain i mean it's incredible francis um

one of the things i really like about your research is that you are trying to uncover all the different mechanisms that are going on in the body with these slower touch C-tactile afferent fibers and we'll go into where those actually go to in the brain but for all the science for the complexity which is really important the actual take-home intervention for society for us as individuals is we need to touch more. We need to, you know, we need to stroke more. We need to not, you know, give touch more priority in our lives. And I love that there's a real complexity in the science, but potentially the take-home is rather simple.

Yeah, absolutely. What we're fighting against, of course, is the demonization of touch. Now, clearly, there are instances of inappropriate touch. The media feed off it in terms of, as we've seen in Hollywood and what we've seen with Savile, etc. They build a whole sort of aversion to the fact that every touch now has got some kind of perversity associated with it. And just to be clear for people listening, we're not condoning any of that at all. Absolutely not. And just to be clear for people listening, we're not condoning any of that at all.

Absolutely not. But the impact that it has on people's sort of belief systems, if you like, is to legislate against it. I mean, I gave a talk at the British Psychological Society a couple of years ago where there are a couple of teachers there were relating the fact that some male teacher helped an eight, nine-year-old girl out of a swimming pool she then got i don't know what the link was but in any case the police interviewed this girl and they looked from the when the transcripts were finally released that there was some let's say coercion but in event, this guy went to jail for six months. He was imprisoned for inappropriate touch. When the transcripts were finally extracted, it was found that he was completely innocent. Now, what's happened, of course, that gets into the teaching fraternity.

We're getting less male teachers prepared to sort of take the risk of being accused of inappropriate touching. prepare to sort of take the risk of being accused of inappropriate touching. We're seeing it in foster care as well, where couples now are far more wary about taking on board what are generally disturbed children, in terms of the legislation now that is out there, is that any form of touch now can be seen as um problematic in fact one of these teachers also a very experienced teacher related the fact that he you know you know sort of touched a kid in the class and some of these kids are quite clever oh sir i'm going to report you for

inappropriately touching me now this teacher because he had a lot of experience basically just turned around this kid and told him to just, you know, be quiet. He had that confidence that he wasn't going to be sort of, you know, overridden by this child trying to sort of, you know, make some inappropriate accusation. But younger teachers may not have that confidence to deal with it i wouldn't even say just younger teachers if i even reflect on my own experience as a doctor i'm sure 10 years well you know yeah about 10 years ago even 15 years ago if i was delivering bad news to a patient almost certainly i would have put my hands on their shoulder you know on their arm just to you know really try and have a certain warmth and empathy whilst delivering that information. I also have changed my behavior in consultations because of the way touch is now reported in society. I'm a little bit nervous about any form of physical contact in case it is misconstrued. And so this

is a wider point, isn't it, about what the news does. It's not just touch, it's with, you know, with the 24-hour news cycles that we now live live in when any problem in society is magnified. And that's what we see. The tendency is to think that actually it's everywhere, whether it's terrorism, whether it's risk of being attacked on the streets, you know, and, and actually a big theme of, of, um, my book on stress is how our brain is constantly responding to the information that it's giving, that it's given. And if we're constantly given information that actually the world's a bad place, we're also going to react. So we're going to think it's a bad place. We're going to start to go into a more stress states because of it. And actually I've personally noticed that actually,

if I watch less news, which I've started to do for the last two or three years, I'm happier, I'm calmer. I think actually the media, maybe inadvertently or advertently, create this rather interesting area called perceived norms. Now, perceived norm is your perception of a risk. There was an example many years ago where a few old people were being mugged and what happened there is that that generally that information got out into the general

population and then elderly people en masse became very anxious about the fact that they may also get mugged and that's a perceived norm and a perceived norm is an event that doesn't relate to any statistical risk the risk is still absolutely minimal but you get this perception that elderly people are now all at risk of being mugged elderly people get very anxious in in your book stress because the media have wound up the risk of something and what we're seeing now is the same with touch winding up the fact that all forms of touch now are potentially highly risky and contentious therefore you throw the baby out with the bathwater and the safest thing to do of course is to basically ban touch i remember you telling me francis um some some incredible statistics

on humans members of basketball teams who use more hands-on interactions with each other perform better ending up higher in their leagues if a waiter taps you on the shoulder when they give you the bill you tip more just from having that touch yeah um and people visiting a library if they were treated in a tactile way they reported a much more positive experience than those who weren't touched. I mean, these are human sort of reports that we're seeing, whether it's a sports team, whether it's your, you know, how much you tip someone, all these things show the primal importance of touch and how important touch is and how we are hardwired for millions of years to receive touch.

Yep, and again, you know, as a neuroscientist, I'm obsessed with trying to understand where the mechanisms are that explain these behaviors. And of course, our view is that this C-tactile afferent has evolved specifically to provide the reward signals that basically build affiliative relationships between human primates. This nerve fiber is playing as fundamental a protective role as the nociceptor. And if you think, again, getting back to the ablation argument, there are rare cases of children born with a congenital absence of pain nerves,

these senociceptors. I always use this example, horrendous as it is, of this little girl who had no pain nerves, no senociceptors in her body, and she'd like jumping off high tables because she liked the popping noise in her knees when she landed. If you do not have a C-nose receptor, you'll put your hand in boiling water and you won't know about it. Now, everybody instinctively thinks, oh, how important that nerve fiber is in terms of its protective role. I'm making the same argument for the C-tactile afferent. If there's an absence of the c-tactile afferent if there's an

absence of that c-tactile afferent now whether that's genetically or whether it's epigenetically and the epigenetic route is the one i'm most focused on and that's the environment babies that do not get adequate touch during development there's a negative consequence on the way that that brain that social brain is developed. So these C5s evolved in evolutionary time, by the way. The C5s evolved before the fast nerves. Before the fast nerves? If you're an engineer and say you're building an animal, let's say, the first thing you put into that animal is our protection systems.

So the nociceptor is important. This link between physical touch in terms of that animal is our protection systems. So the nociceptor is important. This link between physical touch in terms of that animal needs to know that it's got conspecific. So these C fibres evolved earlier to basically allow that organism to develop being protected. So in communities and tribes. Yeah, absolutely. So on one level, on an evolution level, thinking that why would these slower nerve fibers that feed the emotional brain develop before the fast nerve

fibers that will will tell us where danger is and could it be that actually the the most the best way to protect ourselves in the past was to be part of a strong tribe and a community could it be that well at a very primitive level um the protection systems need to be in place before you then get out and explore when you get out to explore that's when you need fastest and you need to catch prey you need you need to yes i'm going back to multicellular organisms throughout here interestingly enough by the way uh geneticists use a little worm called C. elegans. Now, C. elegans is the only animal that we have a complete connectome for. So it's got 302 neurons. Can you explain connectome for people who may not understand that?

Connectome is how those neurons communicate with each other to control behavior. So the connectome, there's a massive project in Europe and in America now to try and work out the human connectome, i.e. how all these billions of neurons in our brain connect to each other. The only connectome that we've ever worked out, by the way, for those who think that the human brain connectome project is going to deliver soon, is C. elegans, which is 302 neurons, and that took 12 years. Now, out of those 302 neurons, six of them are gentle touch. Now if you grow C. elegans from an egg in a colony on a Petri dish, that C. elegans will grow to its normal length of three or four millimetres and be a healthy little worm. If you take that egg and put it in isolation that sea elegans hardly grows at all it grows to

half its normal length and its behavior is stunted the one thing that it doesn't get of course in isolation is physical touch so again we see now at the very simplest primitive organism the physical contact between one individual and another is playing a fundamental role in development and again getting back to preterm infants we see the consequence of many preterm infants their growth is stunted and i'm making the argument again that that is because this c-tactile system is not getting the stimulation it would have got in utero with the amniotic fluid washing over it the infant rubbing against the womb wall all of that tactile information is now being removed when the infant the preterm infant is placed in the incubator so again we need to i think

yeah i may be wrong but the experiment like experiment you know the opportunity here is to try and find a way to put that gentle massaging touch back in the incubator so my university has recently awarded me 25 000 pounds on a in a dragon's den type competition and the project that i put forward was back in the sack the idea being that we want to make sure, try and find a way of putting the preterm infant's incubator environment similar to what it was removed from when it was in the amniotic sack. So Back in the Sack is a sort of a sexy strap line. And what we're trying to do now is develop a mattress

that the baby would be placed on in the incubator that basically ripples up and down as if it was getting some kind of you know as if it were being stroked or the kind of touch that it would have been getting whilst in the womb. Oh incredible absolutely incredible and is that ongoing at the moment? Well £25,000 isn't going to get us very far by the way because I've been involved in the development of medical devices in my past. But it's a start. It will enable us to get some kind of evidence, I hope, that this tactile reintroduction of touch is going to play a fundamental role in that infant's future.

infant's future and if you look at the costs as i mentioned earlier that preterm infants have are at risk of severe not severe well sometimes severe but cognitive deficits and my point here is that that cognitive deficit is basically related to the fact that they're not being touched that's the big if here there's 15 million babies a year go into incubators neonatologists are getting you know cleverer and cleverer at keeping preterm infants alive and well but they're physically alive and well but there's a person there yeah and that person is going to suffer from the evidence that we have from that uh early removal from the world you You know, it just strikes me that your research, Francis, and the societal implications of it

are not a million miles away from what a recent guest on my podcast, Dr. Gabor Mate, was talking about. I'm not sure if you've come across Gabor. I'm a great fan of his. He's great. I interviewed him maybe four or five episodes ago ago and it's probably the most popular podcast episode i've done to date um we've had so many thousands of listens i think about 65 or 70 000 so far

people listened to that and shared it because he also makes the case not directly about touch but the importance of early childhood and um if as an infant, if as a child, you are properly loved, nurtured, cared for, the downstream consequences are profound. So he talks a lot about addiction, whether it's sugar, sex, cocaine, heroin, gambling. He thinks the root cause of all of it is the same and it comes down to our childhoods and this whole feeling of you know feeling as though we're enough feeling nurtured so we don't need to seek reward in other places and i know we've spoken before that you feel that actually if you don't get enough touch as a child and your social brain doesn't evolve appropriately

you may start to seek reward in other places absolutely i mean what this research really is beginning to show us wrong and is that we have the neurobiological basis that explains many of the psychologists views of attachment all of this plethora of of uh research out there about how a child that hasn't grown up in an optimum environment and all their behavioral problems. I mean, I've called this nerve fiber in my more wildest moments the Higgs boson of the social brain. This nerve fiber primes the development of a fully functioning normal social brain. If it doesn't happen, and this again is the opportunity i'm pursuing with the neonatal intensive care unit if that touch is not delivered what are the consequences well the consequences

are as i have mentioned 25 of those preterm infants develop autism all or most of them will show some form of cognitive deficit all of them segue again in into the descriptions you were just talking about in terms of downstream behavioral consequences that can be traced back to early life adversity. The worst thing you can do to a child from our research is not touch it. That is the worst thing that can happen. So what we have is a neurobiological basis of the social brain. Now, that's a really big arc,

that. Huge. But if you're tracing back all of these downstream consequences to early life interventions, you've got a real focus now on at least testing the hypothesis that if touch is no longer administered to that preterm or that term infant, what will it look like? Well, the very first person, by the way, to sort of bring this word attachment into the lexicon was Harry Harlow. In the 1950s, many of you may be aware of the fact that Harlow removed infant monkeys from their mother at birth.

They were put in a cage and they were given two surrogate mothers. One was a wire-covered surrogate that had food and the other was a cloth-covered surrogate mothers one was a wire covered surrogate that had food and the other was a cloth covered surrogate now where that infant should have been was where the petrol pump was now that developing brain needed fuel so it should be clinging to the wire surrogate where the food was what harlow found is that that monkey would spend 98 of its time clinging to the useless cloth-covered surrogate. Here we see, in a primate, the instinctive reward benefit of soft touch. Now, Harlow knew nothing about these sea tactile afferents, by the way, but he recognized that those monkeys would cling to something

that was soft and cuddly rather than something that had an award value of food. And what most people don't read about Harlow's work is that you now look at those infant monkeys when they were adults, they were all, to some extent, behaviorally deranged. They were aggressive. They were fighting. They were basically not well in terms of their behavior. It really is incredible. And again, this nerve fiber pops up, yeah?

With this, the C-tactile afrin or the consequences of not getting gentle touch can we just go into that c-tactile nerve afrin for a second because we've not yet covered uh one of the most interesting things for me which is that um you you taught me about this nerve fiber and you told me that there's an optimal speed for it to be stimulated. Can you tell me about that? Well, just brief history. This nerve fiber was first discovered in the mammals in a nerve that innervated the leg of a cat by a Swedish neurophysiologist called Soterman. It was subsequently found in all mammals, but it was thought to be vestigial or not present in humans until this wonderful neurophysiologist in Sweden

developed a technique called microneurography. Now, microneurography is important to the discovery and characterization of these CTs. Microneurography is a technique where you can take a needle as thin as an acupuncture needle, you can pop it through the skin into an underlying nerve bundle. Now, that underlying nerve bundle, if you like, is like a big telephone cable with hundreds of different conversations

coming down each of these axons. What Valbo Nordin and his colleagues found when they were recording from a peripheral nerve in the face initially is that they came across a C-fibre using this technique of micconeurography that did not was not activated to a tissue threatening stimulus in its receptive field in the skin but this nerve fiber responded only to gentle moving touch across the skin area that this nerve fiber innervated this was the first observation in humans

that we had a C-fiber that responded to gentle touch. And that really, I read that paper in 1995, I remember I was flying out of Washington and I did one of those sort of Damascus moments where I thought I know exactly what's going on here.

This nerve fiber is playing a fundamental role as a neurobiological substrate for why a touch is pleasant and rewarding. Now that nerve fibre, over the subsequent 20 years, we've published a number of papers in Nature and Neuron characterising the nerve fibre's properties. So getting back to that comment you just made, Rongan, is that when we find a C-tactile afferent and they're difficult to record from, we have the only laboratory in the United Kingdom that's capable of recording from the C-tactile afferents, by the way, is that when we find one of these nerve fibers and we developed a robot that's stroked across the receptive field of the skin where the nerve fiber innervated, we find this interesting characteristic of this nerve fiber. Its discharge activity is related to the stroking velocity of the stimulus that's moving across the skin. And these nerve fibers are tuned to exactly the kind of velocities that if you were asked to rate fast, slow, and medium touch, you'll go for a touch around about 3 to 5 centimeters per second

as being most pleasant. The nerve fiber responds specifically to velocities of stroking that you would instinctively use if you were stroking your baby or your wife or your husband. These nerve fibers are tuned to respond precisely to the kind of touch that we find pleasant. So this is a... So it's hardwired, isn't it?

It is hardwired. You can measure it and say three to five centimetres per second, but none of us stroke our partner or our children measuring our touch speed. No, we don't, but we just do it instinctively. We do it instinctively. Yeah, we gave... Some of my colleagues in Germany just did an experiment where they asked people basically to just stroke a wooden arm or a tabletop.

And their velocities were all over the place. When they were then asked to stroke up their partner, it tuned down specifically to this window of three to five centimeters. It's incredible. is what changed my behavior because um i think when we were filming there was also you had one of your you either had a volunteer or a research assistant who um was being stroked whilst um the speed you know while you were measuring how much the c-tactiles were being stimulated and it was that whole term of stroking because at that same time my uh kids particularly my son was always asking at night time before we went to bed oh daddy can you stroke me and you know what sometimes i would sometimes you know what i'm not sure i gave it that significance i don't think i quite understood

but literally i came back from that filming day in liverpool and i thought wow my son is is literally craving some deep emotional um response that he's wanting stroking to sort of feed his emotional brain and since that time I now stroke my son and my daughter to sleep on most nights when I'm around in a way that I didn't before and that's directly down to your research so genuinely huge heartfelt thanks to you for that because I think it's important and if there's just you know that hopefully there's plenty of take-homes from this conversation with people who are listening but um you know stroking your children more hugging them more I think would be a really good one yeah again you know knowledge is power on go and I think the more we recognize that this is as important as

putting food in their bellies is is keeping this tactile system activated and you don't overdo it i think like everything in nature you can overdo and underdo you can smother a child with touch which may be you're not as bad but not as good as as not touching at all but it's that optimal it's just normal behavior basically well i guess it's what was normal in human history until very recently again I think that's the key yeah we mentioned earlier that the world is changing at a rate which is kind of difficult to sort of catch up with particularly with the technologies which are removing this necessity to touch now well we're touching technology a lot we're touching our

yeah we're touching these screens a lot but in fact i know i know in the stress solution actually i think i've quite the statistic i can't remember at the top of my head but it's hundreds of times a day we're touching our smartphones and i think i'll make the case that we touch and we know the curvy contours of our smartphones much better than we know our partners and how much we touch our partners because i kind of feel it's quite telling isn't it we're living in this ultra connected society and i know it's perverse on a digital sense we're more connected than ever before but in terms of deep meaningful human connection yeah we're not have we ever been this isolated we haven't been and i think you know

maybe we're beginning to see i mean i'm you know a university lecturer we see in the media as well as i see it firsthand you know the number of kids that have having psychological problems you know they're there they can't cope with stress basically yeah and that lack of stress of course manifests itself with all these anxiety conditions etc you know although it's a difficult one to sort of prove, it is the beginnings of a reflection of the fact that these kids did not grow up in the world I grew up in, where we were just out playing every weekend. We were mucking around with our mates. We had a lot more interaction with each other and with the world around us in an exploratory way

than you have now with being stuck in front of a tablet and then interacting. I mean mean the whole sort of oxymoron of social media you know this isn't social at all you know it's quite the opposite but only now is research beginning to try and understand that you know what these developments are doing is something that in you know the millions of years of evolution of you know of human primates has never happened before and there is this potential risk that we may be setting fire to something now which could have consequences as you mentioned earlier the brain knows what it wants even if your mind doesn't and sometimes if

a reward is being denied not in any obvious way but you're not getting enough of a reward there's a propensity to seek another replacement now that other replacement can be sugar can be fat can be drugs something yeah it needs to fill that void you're not consciously aware of what it is but you need to fill it with something now that something of course can be this phenomenal increase in in the in the use of recreational drugs that we see with teenagers and kids these days for people listening who have not heard my conversation with uh gabble mate i highly encourage that you you go and listen to that because gabble talks about how in childhoods

um you you cannot get enough of that emotional nourishment by either bad things happening to you or by not enough good things happening. And I think that really fits with what you're saying. Not getting enough warm affectionate touch could be one of those things that leads to downstream consequences later. Francis, there's so much we could talk about. I'm going to have to start wrapping this up. I think we'll have to continue this on a further conversation,

maybe a few months if you're up for doing that. Absolutely. Because I know you're doing some interesting research on whether children and adolescents, if they are given a certain kind of touch, can it lower their stress response to exams, all kinds of really interesting stuff that I'd love to dive into. But one thing I think we must cover is some people may be listening to this thinking well you know I wasn't touched much as a child is there anything I can do now or some parents might be thinking um oh you know I'm not sure if I've touched my kids enough you know what can I do so how much of this is reversible and I mean do we know much about that yet uh well again because the mechanism and

importance of this nerve fiber system has not been fully recognized and it still needs an awful lot of sort of publicity and thank you again ron grand for the opportunity to to voice uh what this nerve fiber's functional characteristics and its role is is that yes you've got this wonderful thing in the human brain called plasticity and that plasticity is a lifesaver in many ways. You can put back things that did not necessarily happen in the early stages of development. And that's certainly the finding with the Romanian orphanage children. When they were placed in loving, caring foster parents, those children's behavior began to stabilize and normalize.

Now, there can be some long-term consequences but all is not lost i think there is the opportunity to sort of to reprime that system if you like at any stage i mean there's something recently again looking at the other end of this arc by the way that i got involved in too late is the bbc has recently run a massive loneliness project and the one thing that they didn't bother to really look at was what don't lonely people get. They don't get touched. Loneliness, there's a statistic now

that there's something called the odds ratio, and that's the relationship between an event and a consequence. The odds ratio of an early death from smoking is something like 38 percent or diabetes the odds ratio of an early death from loneliness is 48 yeah it's incredible and my point here is that what these people are not looking at generally is that lonely people don't get touched and that is something else i think we should well francis just on that um i just want to say another way that your research has affected my behavior is i do care, you know, help to care for my elderly mother who lives nearby.

And I'm often around several times a week. And I've often, you know, change the light bulbs, put the washing on or put the bins out or do the things that I need to do. Yeah, the functional. Yeah, the functional things and since talking to you since uh immersing myself in your research you kind of spend a lot of time with me teaching me about it so i could write about it in my book um i have not only changed the behavior of my kids i've changed the behavior with my mom and almost certainly now when i go around and see her even if it's to do things like throw the bins out you know take the bins out i will go and i'll give her a hug and you know as you say knowledge is power it's not that we're it's not that we're intentionally not

doing these things we probably just don't give them the priority when we're so busy doing the other things that we have to do we forget about there's some of these fundamental necessities absolutely and we've we've forgotten to be human in many ways haven't we you know and the instinct is still there as you notice that gentle touch or cuddle that makes a long lasting impact yeah it's not just an immediate thing and i know you've done you've done a lot more research on this and i think we're going to go into depth on this on on a on another conversation in a few months right so guys please do let us know if you're enjoying this and if you want more about francis's research in terms of how many different scenarios touch can potentially impact in terms of our stress response and a whole host of other parameters. going down this route since studying these touch nerve fibers what impact has it had on your own life and your own behavior if any it's it's provided me with an obsession i'm afraid

is that you know is that the time that i need in order to complete this mission is just you know i thought it is something that i'm just devoted to and dedicated to. We need to get this information out there. And with all research scientists, of course, you know, in order to do research, we need funding to do it. So we have that battle against trying to get enough research funding. And I will say, guys, everything Francis and I spoke about on the podcast today, including links to the papers that we've talked about,

we're going to put it all together for you on the show notes page which will be drchastity.com forward slash touch so you can go there afterwards if you want to continue your learning experience and read some of francis's papers read some articles he's written in the in the media and the popular press i think you're really going to enjoy them so do check out the show notes page afterwards francis i guess i was talking more about do you touch people more now than before you started this research do you think i don't know you should ask my wife about that one i i came up i was brought up in a background but i don't you know the 50s and 60s i wouldn't cuddle and touch by my mum and dad so you know i don't think there is a sort of a yeah i'm not actually that fond of it well that actually replicates what i see in practice which is um people who weren't touched that much as children

i have found and again i'm not saying this with it with a scientific background i'm just saying my experience as a clinician is that some of those people find it tricky as they get older to touch more because they find it slightly uncomfortable and I do I know in the stress illusion I talk about some strategies that they can use to try and sort of build that in I'd put a really nice case study in there of where it really has helped someone even though they found it hard at first so yeah fair enough I need therapy god who doesn't um but just to finish off, I don't know if you feel, I know you're a scientist, you know, working in a lab rather than a clinician seeing patients. But do you have any sort of top tips for people who are listening to this or sort of tips for society and how we can actually start making a change to put touch where it needs to be put?

start making a change to to put touch where it needs to be put i think yes rail against the touch police have the confidence to to use your instinctive and instinctual recognition that touch is valuable and meaningful and just don't be scared i think you know this risk that everybody that's being touched by somebody is somehow a molester we need to tip that balance the other way and i think people need to demonstrate collectively that they want touch put back where it should be and that's embedded in normal human behavior right so that's a brilliant way to finish off the podcast um i know you were sort of uh saying that social media wasn't particularly social are you on any social media networks yourself in terms of in case people who are listening this want to contact you want to sort of interact with you and tell them what they think of your research and what they thought of this conversation? My academic credentials through my email are

readily findable within Google. I do have some kind of Facebook presence, but it's not something I'm particularly fond of. Fine. So people can let me know on social media what they thought of this conversation. I'll relay that to you. But I will put all links to Francis and his work in the show notes page. Francis, I really appreciate your time today. You are doing such phenomenal work that I think is going to really help humanity, help society make much needed changes. I want to acknowledge you for that. Thank you. Thank you, Ron Gang, for the opportunity. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Ron Gang, for the opportunity. It's been a pleasure. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. I really hope you enjoyed this in-depth look at human touch and are starting to understand how important regular, safe,

non-threatening touch is for our overall health and well-being. One thing I really want to emphasize is that this conversation is not about blame in any shape or form. It is simply about trying to raise awareness about one of the most important senses that both individually and as a society, we need to give more attention to. Everything we discussed today,

as well as links to more of Professor McGlone's work, is available on the show notes page for today's episode, which is drchastji.com forward slash touch. Now, I appreciate there may not have been as many take-homes in today's conversation as usual, but I really do think it's important for me to showcase cutting edge research on this podcast that may help open our minds to new ideas as well as inspire us to different behaviors. Of course, we did discuss parents like myself, stroking and touching our children more, touching friends and family more, and basically not being afraid to use appropriate touch in our everyday lives. As mentioned in my new book, The Stress Solution, there is a whole chapter on the importance of human touch, which Professor Francis McGlone was

instrumental in helping me write. In the book, I really try to simplify his research, make it relevant to all of us with various personal anecdotes and case studies. And then I finish off with plenty of take-home strategies to help you increase the amount of human touch you are getting in your own life. You can pick up a copy of The Stress Solution in all bookshops and online, as well as the audiobook, which I am narrating.

All international book links for The Stress Solution are available at drchastji.com forward slash book if you do enjoy my weekly podcasts one of the best ways that you can support them is by leaving a review on whichever platform you listen to the podcast on these reviews really do make a difference so if you have two minutes i would really appreciate you taking the time to do one you can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now and sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels.

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Making lifestyle changes is always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time. Thank you.