Good Life Project - How Touch Can Make or Break Your Life, with David Linden

Episode Date: July 11, 2016

Ever wonder why the exact same touch by one person will give you the creeps, but by another will make you yearn for more?On this episode of The Good Life, I am excited to bring you David Linden, a Johns Hopkins Neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author of Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind.The research that David has been conducting on the effects of touch on the human mind is a powerful reminder of the role touch plays in nearly every aspect of human development. Everything from love to intelligence, sex to attachment, orgasm or itch and beyond... basically, anything we touch or get touched by profoundly influences our personality, perception of people and the world.Whether touch is given or withheld at any age can shape the entirety of our beings. Our neurology, psychology and our ability to live functional, good lives is dependent on touch.If you have ever wondered why touch is so important to the development of infants, or why we find touch so vital to our own mental well-being, you are going to want to turn up the volume and listen in. David answers all of these questions and so many more.In This Episode, You'll Learn:The events that led David to write three books on touch.The catastrophic results when loving touch is withheld from infants.How appropriate touch can change the way a patient views a doctor’s effectiveness and care.How incidental sensory experiences can influence our impressions of others.What touch actually is and how we've adapted different mechanisms to experience it.How touch is involved with everything from orgasm to reading Braille.How touch varies across cultures.Why sexual touch is so powerful.Mentioned in This Episode:Connect with David: David Linden | BlogTouch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind by David LindenDacher Keltner | Greater Good Science CenterJohn BarghPresence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy CuddyNational Institutes of Health Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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your body and calming your brain and reconnecting with people who just see the world the way that you do and accept you completely as you are. So that's what we've created with our Camp Good Life Project or Camp GLP experience. We've actually brought together a lineup of really inspiring teachers from art to entrepreneurship, from writing to meditation, pretty much everything in between. It's this beautiful way to fill your noggin with ideas to live and work better, and a really rare opportunity to create the type of friendships and stories you pretty much thought you'd left behind decades ago. It's all happening at the end of August, just about 90 minutes from New York City, and we're well on our way to selling out spots at this point. So be sure to grab your spot as soon as you can if it's interesting to you. You can learn more at goodlifeproject.com slash camp or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes now. We know that doctors who touch their patients appropriately during their treatment, that their patients have better medical outcomes and reduce stress

hormone levels, and the doctors are rated as more caring. Today's guest, David Linden, is a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, New York Times bestselling author, and has written a book called Touch, the Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind, which I'm fascinated by. I am somebody who, when I took the love languages test, physical touch is my sort of major love language. And there's just this fascinating exploration of how touch affects us, how everything from love to caresses, to sex, to scratching and itching, to basically anything that we touch or get touched by profoundly influences our personality, our perception of people and the world.

And depending on how old or young we are, when we either have touch or have it withheld from us, can literally shape the entirety of our beings, our neurology and our psychology and our ability to actually live functional good lives. Really excited to share this in-depth conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Really excited to actually have this conversation with you, spend some time with your work. And it's kind of funny for me because, you know, in a sort of completely pop psychology and consumer level, you know, I at some point took my love language test and found out that my primary love language was physical touch. And I'm somebody who's always been very tactically oriented.

So it's kind of fun to have a conversation where we get to go a little bit deeper into that. Absolutely. Let's leap in. Yeah. So one of my curiosities, just kind of out of the gate, is really what led you or what's driven your fascination and your research and your exploration into touch? Well, really, there's two different things that led me there. So I'm not a touch researcher myself. I have a laboratory, but we don't work on touch. We work on other topics. And I write books about neuroscience for a general audience, and this is the third one about touch.

And I'm always looking for topics that I think are central to our human experience and where there is recent research that illuminates that and where the topic hasn't been covered recently. And so touch certainly fulfills all those criteria. But the other more immediate reason for me is that I work at Johns Hopkins University. And it just turns out randomly that Johns Hopkins University happens to be a world center of touch research. And so for years, I've been eating lunch with my buddies, and they've been telling me about their touch research. And I became a fanboy, if you will, of touch research. And so really, it's those two strands that led me to write this book. you share in the book is around the idea of when we talk about the different senses that we want to hold on to, to say, we often focus on sight and sound or hearing. But touch rarely ever enters that conversation. But you make a powerful argument that that, in fact, may be one of the most sacrosanct. It is, absolutely. And I think part of the reason why we take touch for granted is because we never experience it being gone.

It's always off, right? Anyone who is sighted can close their eyes and imagine being blind. And anyone can plug their ears and imagine being deaf. But there's no way to turn off your touch sense. And yet we know that during early human development, if you're born blind, you can develop a fine mind and a And you'll have attachment disorders. You'll develop compulsive, self-soothing, rocking motions and cognitive delays. And it's not just neuropsychiatric problems. Your growth will be stunted and you're immune and your gastrointestinal systems won't develop well.

And we know that all of these problems can be ameliorated by 30 minutes a day of loving touch. And we know this from what unfolded in understaffed Romanian orphanages in the 1980s under the Ceausescu regime. Yeah, and I remember when sort of the stories around that broke, it was absolutely heartbreaking. One of my curiosities around that is later in life, if somebody has come up in an environment which is devoid of that sort of necessary 30 minutes of daily touch and has experienced all of the physiological and developmental hindrances that come from it, is there a way to remediate it? Is there a way to, you know, can you reintroduce touch and in any way reverse these or is it sort of it is what it is for life? Unfortunately, the bad news is the window closes at two years. And so the

people who don't receive the loving touch before age two years, the effects of them providing touch enrichment after two years, while they are mildly beneficial, are really not going to reverse these terrible courses. The critical period ends. This isn't to say that touch isn't important after age two years when you grow up normally, when you're not touch deprived. It is important, but it's important in a subtler way. It's important because it's an opportunity to develop bonds of trust and compassion and team building and community. Touch is social glue, and it is more of a missed opportunity than an utter developmental disaster as it is in very early life. Yeah. Take me deeper into this idea of touch as social glue. Well, there are a lot of examples. We know that doctors who touch their patients appropriately

during their treatment, that their patients have better medical outcomes and reduced stress hormone levels, and the doctors are rated as more caring. And one of the most interesting studies on this actually came from an analysis of teams of the National Basketball Association. And this was work done by Dr. Keltner's group at UC Berkeley. And what they did is that they got videotapes of all the NBA games in the first half of the season. And they watched them all. And for each team, they scored all the celebratory touch, all the pats on the rear end and the chest bumps and the high fives and all the ways that people celebrate a basket or a steal or some other good outcome. And they came up with an index of celebratory touch for each team. And then they asked, does that index predict anything about what will happen in the second half of the season?

And the answer is that those teams that engaged in more celebratory touch not only won more games in the second half of the season, but they also played in a more cooperative fashion. For example, the star might be more likely to pass off the ball to another team member who had a better shot. So these are some of the ways in which we know that touch functions as social glue. And it does it in the family, the workplace, the community, in romantic couples, siblings, parents and children, everywhere. Yeah. Is there an understanding of the deeper mechanism that sort of explains why it's so important in this social context. Yes, there is. It turns out that all of the skin can be divided into two categories, hairy skin and so-called glabrous or hairless skin. Glabrous skin is really only found in a few places like the lips and the nipples and actually only part of the nipples and the

soles of the feet and the palms of the hands and a couple of other spots. And all the rest of the skin is hairy. Even a woman's cheek or the inside of an arm has tiny little hairs on it when you look at it carefully. And we know that hairy skin has a kind of nerve ending called a C-tactile fiber. And this fiber wraps around the base of hair follicles and it sends hair deflection as is produced by a caress given to hairy skin. And these fibers project ultimately to a part of the brain

that is involved in the emotional perception of touch. It's what gives certain touches their good feeling. And that brain region is called the posterior insula. So we believe it is ultimately activation of the posterior insula by appropriate interpersonal touching that is the substrate of the social glue. And what's fascinating about that to me also is that you gave a range of examples. The one with basketball, that interaction actually translated to an improvement in athletic performance, which surprised me. Well, it did. I mean, it led to an improvement in athletic performance, but perhaps that athletic performance really results not from jumping higher or running faster, but results from in a team sport having the different members of the team more attuned to each other socially.

Yeah, that makes sense. And trusting each other. Because really what touch – what appropriate social touch conveys is we're on the same side. You can trust me. I'm an ally. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, it would be fascinating. I'm curious if you're aware of research that was similar to that, but then measured performance where, you know, there was, say, a team, but a team of bowlers or team team of gymnasts where then the actual performance was measured on an individual basis and whether there was any effect there.

That's a good question. I'm not aware of a study like that, but you could certainly imagine that there would be social effects even in that sort of team when there's individual performance. Because even though your performance is individual, to some degree, you perform for your team. You're fighting on the same side. It's not as if social factors don't come into play, even if you're the only one doing the sport at the given time. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually.

One of the other things that surprised me about sort of the social context of touch. And I had seen this research before, and you brought it up in your recent book, was this idea that the temperature of something that we're touching at any given moment in time can actually change our assessment of people around us. Yes, this is rather remarkable. I mean, in some ways, you could think of this as a bug. So social psychologists have known for many years that when we first meet people or even see them on TV or read a resume, that we rapidly form an impression of them. And the first dimension that we form an impression of them is, are they warm or are they cold? That is to say, are they an ally and trustworthy or might they work against our best interest? And then the second dimension we evaluate is, are they competent or

incompetent? It doesn't matter if they're an ally or not. And so in this experiment that was done by John Barg's group at Yale, they had people hold either a mug of hot liquid or a mug of cold liquid immediately before reading the resume of someone for a job. And then they were asked to fill out aater had just been holding a warm cup of liquid, that the applicant was rated as warmer. That is to say, more friendly, more approachable, more trustworthy, more of a team player. Interestingly, though, it's not as if the warm cup conferred a warm glow, if you will, over every quality. In other words, those people weren't rated as smarter or more serious about the job or more competent, for example. The warm cup only conferred warmth.

Interestingly, when a similar study was done and the resume was either put on a very light clipboard or on a very heavy one that weighed about as much as an old school laptop, they found that then the people whose resume were on the heavy clipboard were rated as literally having more gravitas. That is to say being more serious about the position. But again, this did not confer a positive impression in any other way. It was very delimited to weight. Yeah, it's so fascinating because, you know, I think we'd all like to assume that we're a little more evolved than that. But in fact, you know, we still have these just fundamental reactions on that level. I mean, it's interesting to me also in the context, I don't know if you've seen some of Amy Cuddy's most recent work.

She wrote about this in her recent book, Presence, where she was exploring some experiments where she was exploring warmth and competence. And what she said is essentially that people won't get to competence until they've moved past warmth, until they've actually found that. So if that, in fact, is valid, blended with this research that you've been exploring and sharing, it's both interesting and a little bit alarming. Well, it is alarming. It's alarming that our impressions are influenced by incidental sensory experiences that really have nothing to do with the person we're evaluating whatsoever.

And I think this happens all the time. One time I was on a committee that was reviewing grants for the NIH, and we were at a hotel, in a conference room at a hotel in Washington, D.C., and we were exhausted. It was the end of the second day hotel in Washington, D.C. And we were exhausted. It was the end of the second day and we've been reviewing grants. We were very, very tired and feeling grouchy. And outside of the conference room started up like a reggae-themed beach party with – we could hear reggae music playing and we could hear beers being opened and the tinkle of glasses and people splashing into the pool. And it just made us all hate our lives that much more. We wanted to be there rather than in this horrible, farce-lit room reading grants.

And I'm convinced that the people who had their grants evaluated during that last time actually got worse scores than they deserved because our moods got shifted and we got grouchier. Yeah, that makes so much sense. There's a well-known study of an Israeli parole board actually that looked at the rate of parole immediately before lunch and immediately after lunch. And based on whether somebody was hungry or recently sated by a nice lunch, the parole rates jumped profoundly. So it is interesting how we'd love to think that we're rational beings that make decisions based on as objective things as possible. But there are these factors which really affect us on those levels. And to think also, certainly, Matt, to touch that literally the difference between holding something warm in your hand or not can actually alter your feelings about somebody while you're doing it. You almost want to go into critical conversations bringing pure, unadulterated information about the external world through our senses and then make entirely rational decisions based upon it. And

this is untrue on both counts. There is no perception that isn't convolved with emotion and expectations. Let me give you an example. You might like both coffee and tea. But if I tell you I'm giving you a cup of tea, but instead I put coffee in it, when you take that first sip of coffee, your perception of it is going to be very different than if I had told you the truth. It's the very same. You like coffee, and it's the very same percept.

But if you're expecting it or you're not expecting it, your experience of it is going to be utterly different. Likewise, imagine you're with your sweetheart in a very quiet, connected, loving time and they caress your arm and it feels real nice and you go, oh, that's good. Yeah, boy, that makes me feel loved. And then imagine instead you're with your sweetheart and you're in the middle of an argument and it's not resolved at all and they give you a caress on the arm. The exact same caress, the exact same way, the same place on your arm, the same pressure, the same speed, the same everything. Well, it feels incredibly different in these two cases. It's not just that it feels the same and then upon reflection, it feels different.

No. From the very first moment you perceive it, those two touches feel completely unlike each other. And that's because our perception of touch is a mixture of the discriminative aspects of touch, the facts about touch. Where in my body am I being touched? How strongly and in what fashion? And the emotional overlay of touch that's computed in a different region of the brain that is subject to all these social and contextual influences. Yeah, I mean, it's, and I know one of the, you explore this in a lot more detail, is this idea of caress and also the blend of, you know, the sort of the input side, and then what happens within you on the emotional side and how that translates it. Take me deeper into the emotional impact on how we experience touch. Well, so let me give an example from pain, right? Because pain has a very strong emotional valence. For most people, pain is intrinsically emotionally negative. And so

imagine what would happen if I were to whack you on the thumb with a hammer. Not that I would do that, but just as a thought experiment. If I were to whack you on the thumb with a hammer, what would happen? You would call out, oh, that's terrible. Oh, that feels so bad right on my thumb and now it's throbbing. Oh, that's awful, right? And the reason that you have that reaction is because two and you know how much it hurts because of the activation of your somatosensory cortex, which is the discriminative fact-based touch sensor region of the brain.

And then the emotional negative tone of it, what makes it feel awful is coming from activation of the posterior insula, the brain's emotional touch center. So if you did the same thing and you were someone who had a damaged posterior insula, instead you would say in a very flat, emotion-free voice, yes, that's painful. It's my thumb. It's throbbing. But it would have no emotional resonance. Now what happened for the other way around?

If you had massive damage to your somatosensory cortex and I whacked you on the thumb with a hammer, you would say, oh, that's awful. Oh, that feels so bad. And I would say, oh, I'm so sorry. Where on your body does it feel bad? And you would say, I have no idea. Right? And this is the way that the emotional and the discriminative get combined to make the gestalt sensation of touch and of pain. And it's not just pain. We could make the exact same story for orgasm, for example. Yeah. And actually, I want to go deeper into that. But before we sort of move off of the idea of touch and pain and the emotional element of it, or just the various contributions to the experience of pain, I'm curious about something that I've actually experienced as somebody who

gets headaches. I've noticed an interesting phenomenon. So if I have a headache and I step into a hot shower and I just kind of let the shower run against my head and the back of my neck, what I feel is the heat and I feel the water pulsating against my skin. And for that moment in time, very often the experience of pain inside my head goes away. And I'm curious whether, you know, there is a relationship between this sort of immersive tactile experience of the water and how that might in some way either distract me from or remediate the pain of the headache. Well, there's really kind of two different issues there.

One of them is that it's relaxing to be in the shower. And so overall, you enter a mental state that is different. And we know that when you have a headache or some other form of long-lasting pain, there can be a positive feedback loop between the pain and the anxiety because you wonder how long is this going to go on? Is it going to get worse? You're anxious about that and that makes the pain worse, which then makes the anxiety worse, et cetera. And it can be a very destructive cycle.

So ways to interrupt that cycle, ways that can either distract or relax, ways like mindfulness practice, exercise, being in the shower, praying, playing with your dog, playing with your kids. All of these sorts of phenomena can help break that pain cycle. So that's certainly a phenomenon. Then there's a more local phenomenon. In other words, lots of people, like for example, if you might bang your elbow, what would you do? Well, you'd rub your elbow. And there is evidence from many different parts of the body that competing stimulation can dull pain through interactions probably in the spinal cord and in the brainstem. And so when you have a headache and the water's actually hitting your head, that part of it may be a separate, more local interaction. It's different than the relaxation effect. Right. Would there be a similar analogy then with things like, you know, if you go to

a local pharmacy and you buy the little stick-on icy know, icy hot packs, is that, you know, there's a blend of, well, it may actually be generating more, but at the same time, there's almost an effect of creating this other intense stimulation or touch stimulation that almost distracts you from the, or in some way affects your brain. So you're no longer translating or experiencing the pain side of it as much? Yes. In this case, there's a very special situation because pain receptors and heat receptors are the same molecule or they overlap in lots of neurons.

There are a molecule called TRPV1 or TRPV1. The V stands for vanilloid, which is the chemical compound that includes capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers. So when you use a capsaicin-containing cream, which is what a lot of these sports creams are, and you rub it on an area that's sore, there is a particular reaction. Basically, you're kind of fatiguing the pain-transmitting neurons a little bit. You're setting up a background buzz that fatigues them so that the acute pain sensation from your sore muscle is masked and diminished a bit. But that's a very particular situation. But really, you can do this with capsaicin alone. The creams that use menthol to activate the cold receptors together with the hot receptors really aren't that much better than

the ones that have capsaicin alone. What about ice? I mean, other than the anti-inflammatory effect, is there also sort of a touch-based effect that that has on pain? Yes, absolutely. So ice is an analgesic, and it's an analgesic in a couple of ways. One is that it decreases neural activity generally in the place where it's applied. And the other way is because it activates particular cold receptors that use a molecule called TRPM8, and these neurons interact with the pain system in a complicated way that we don't entirely understand. So we know that there's an effect, and we know part of the cause, but then part of it is still

a bit of a question to us. Right. And you actually bring up something that's really, really interesting, and that is all around the world, even people who've never tasted them before, will tell you that chili peppers are hot and mint is cold. It's not a culturally constructed analogy. You can go to a tiny village in Papua New Guinea. You can go to New York City. You can go to Beijing.

Everyone will say the exact same thing. And why is that? Well, if you had asked me 30 years ago, I would have said, well, there are heat receptors and there are chili pepper chemical receptors and they go to the same place in the brain. They send their messages to the same place in the brain so that they feel alike. And that's a very reasonable explanation but it turns out to be wrong. It turns out that the metaphor is in the molecule. That is to say in the nerve ending in your skin or in your viscera, there is this sensor called TRPV1 and it is activated by both heat and by the chili pepper chemical. And there is another sensor, TRPM8, and it's activated by both cold and by the mint chemical called menthol.

And that's the reason why chili peppers are hot and mint is cold. Interesting. Which also brings up something else that I found really fascinating. When you talk about how touch is experienced differently on a cultural basis and a geographic basis, you shared some really fascinating research about, I guess, would you call it the rate of touch or the persistency of touch across different cultures? Right. And I'm not so sure that it's experienced differently.

In other words, that people have nerve endings that are different. It's really just that there are different cultural ideas about touch. And so the work I referred to was done in the 1960s by a psychologist named Sidney Girard. And he went around to cafes all around the world and liked to spy on couples. And not just romantic couples, but friends or business partners, whoever. And he saw roughly – I don't remember the exact numbers but in San Juan, Puerto Rico, people would touch each other 140 times an hour and in Paris, maybe 40 times an hour and in New York City, maybe five times an hour and in London, zero times an hour. And what this points out is that

there are very different cultural ideas about what constitutes appropriate interpersonal touching among friends, lovers, co-workers, etc. Yeah. And that term appropriate seems to be something that is at least in the US become a really important part of when you mentioned touch. And it's fascinating as a parent of somebody, a daughter who's in high school right now, there's a really interesting change between it and whose kid has experienced both public school and private school. There's an extraordinary heightened awareness now for teachers and the appropriateness of the level of touch with students that from my recollection of coming up as a student, it just wasn't something that was talked about or explored.

And the teachers tended to be much more just organically physical with kids. But it seems like the appropriateness has really, what is or isn't, and the importance of that has seemed to evolve a lot over the last generation or two. Well, it has. It's changed quite a bit. And a lot of places have explicit no-touch policies for teachers, particularly in public schools, and also for coaches. And I think actually that this is a big disaster. In other words, the motivation is good. You want to protect kids against abuse. But the problem is the abusers don't stiff like a tree because they're not allowed to give a hug back to that kindergartner. And that opportunity to build that bond of trust and cooperation is lost. And these well-meaning policies have the inadvertent effect of touch-depriving our kids. And I think it's really a problem. I'm the father of two 19-year-olds just finished they're about and what they like and don't like.

And here was a way for them to touch their friends in a way that wasn't sexual. And I thought that was so important and humane. And I completely agree. And you're validating sort of like what my hunch has been about this, the real hardening and the removal of touch from early childhood education. And like you, I completely understand why there are these across the board policies, you know. And at the same time, you know, you wonder what sort of longer term harm it's doing, both in terms of the current development of trust that would help a child develop and also

their ability to build that and get comfortable with appropriate touch as they grow up themselves. Right. And the real answer is we don't know. Yeah. Because you can't really do controlled experiments this way. So let's move on to sexual touch. One of the things that you explore is this move from the caress to sexual touch and what is what is actually happening there in terms of you know from the touch to the brain and you sort of have this deep exploration of orgasm as

this uh blended touch versus emotional versus brain-oriented experience right and uh we know a fair a bit about what happens in the brain during orgasm. Embarrassingly, we know very little about what happens in the skin during orgasm or to trigger orgasm. And so one obvious question, I mean, you know, you can have an orgasm without any touch at all or by touching anywhere on the body. Nonetheless, there's something special about the genitals, right? I mean, they are the place that produces the strongest sexual sensations, particularly the external clitoris for women and the glands, penis, the head of the penis for men. And so one obvious question is, if you look at biopsies of those areas of skin, is there something special that you can say,

aha, maybe that accounts for why a touch on the genitals feels different than a touch on the lower back. And the answer is yes and no. There's a suggestion. There's a kind of nerve ending that's at very high levels in the genitals, both male and female, and it's called a mucocutaneous end organ, which I think is just a wonderful term. It's even better in German actually.

Genital nervenkörperchen. And these mucocutaneous end organs are found at very high density. And not only that, if you look in the penis, they are found at highest density in precisely those places that most men report as producing the very strongest in sexual sensations. That is to say the frenulum, which is the little bit of elastic tissue on the underside of the head of the penis, and the corona, which is the ridge around the head of the penis. And so you think, well, all right, maybe this nerve ending is what gives rise to sexual sensation. But the problem is right now we don't have a way of blocking that kind of nerve ending alone and seeing if you can diminish sexual sensation or activating that kind of nerve ending alone and see if you can mimic sexual sensation.

And those are the things that one would need in order to believe that this thing really is responsible for sexual sensation. Now, whatever messages there are get to the brain produce a set of changes in the brain that comport very well with the subjective experience of orgasm. And so these include activation of the brain's pleasure center, the same one that's activated by eating food when you're hungry or cocaine or heroin or alcohol or nicotine or cannabis. Activation of the brain's emotional touch center, the posterior insula. Activation of the genital representation in the somatosensory cortex. And then there are also some areas of the brain that are turned off at the moment of orgasm.

So, for example, a fear and vigilance center called the amygdala is turned off. It's turned even lower than it would be in the basal state. And the center related to executive function and the consequences of your actions and planning in the frontal cortex is turned down. And centers related to social evaluation are turned down. And all of these things together, when added up, give us a pretty good sense of what an orgasm is like. It's interesting that there's this excitatory and simultaneous inhibitory seemingly effect in certain areas of the brain. That's right. In order to have the gestalt experience of an orgasm, you got to turn some

areas on and you got to turn some areas off. And actually the areas that you turn on are pretty interesting too. So for example, the experience of an orgasm is overwhelmingly emotionally positive. Yet if you have damage to your posterior insula, the brain's emotional touch center, you can have an orgasm that is convulsive but not compelling. It's more like whoops than like what one would normally experience through either solo or partnered sex. And this goes to show us that we are used to thinking of an experience like an orgasm

as being intrinsically emotionally positive. But this is a trick our brain plays on us just by having the facts of touch area and the emotional touch area active at the same time. So it would almost be the equivalent of a sneeze. Very similar to a sneeze, yes. One of the things that I thought was really fascinating too is this, the idea that if you ask the average person what they know, what is what they thought was maybe the most sensitive, you know, tactically sensitive part of the body, my guess is a fair

amount would offer sexual organs. But there's a really fascinating conversation that you share about Braille and about the sensitivity of your fingers, and how they're really extraordinary organs and how they're actually, I don't know if you would phrase it as more sensitive than the sex organs or more finely sensitive, but it seems like their level of being able to perceive what needs to be perceived to read braille where you blind, you share a bit of a kind of a funny and interesting experiment with one of your colleagues around this. So you're absolutely right that using the term sensitive when applied to an area of the skin is perhaps not a word that is quite precise enough. And so it's important to realize that we think of touch as a unified sensation, but actually touch is many, many different sensors working in parallel. So if we looked in your skin, we would find earned endings specialized for pain and others for itch

and some for heat and cold and for vibration and pressure and texture and fine tactile form. And the ones that are responsible for fine tactile form, which you need to read braille dots, are called Merkel endings. And in your fingertip, there's lots of Merkel endings. So we can read braille dots with our fingertips. Now, for some reason, you can't use your fingertips, like you're paralyzed and you can't use your hands. You can read braille with your lips or your tongue because they also have lots of merkle endings. But some other areas of the body that you think of as being sensitive, like the cornea of your eye is sensitive, right? You get a little bit of grit in your cornea. It hurts like crazy, right?

But – or your genitals are sensitive. A very tiny deflection in the skin in your genitals is very noticeable. It produces a strong sensation. But neither the genitals nor the cornea of the eye have more than a very few Merkel endings. They have a very low density of Merkel endings, which means that their sensitivity is what we call protopathic. That is to say they're sensitive but not discriminative. When you get that little bit of grit in your eye, it hurts like crazy. But knowing precisely where it is in your eye is actually very, very difficult to figure out. And the same is true with the genitals. They're protopathically sensitive. Now, your listeners may not believe this. They want to do their own experiment. They might want to go down to the ATM when no one's around and try to read Braille with their genitals. I can tell them in advance it's not going to work.

And all I would say is please take a disinfecting wipe to clean up when you're done. Right, and you may want to have a lawyer's card on hand as well. We're not advising any of our listeners do that. Yeah, I mean, but it was interesting to hear also that of the potential replacement areas that your lips and tongue would be the ones that actually would have, I guess, most closely been able to mimic the ability to read braille through those places. That's right. And you can entirely predict it based on the density of Merkle endings. So for example, the small of your back is a place that also has very few Merkle endings. And you can't read Braille with the small of your back either.

One of the other areas that you explore is an experience that people tend to have on a pretty regular basis, which is the classic itch. And then the scratch, which pretty much always comes on an automatic basis and which also tends to feel so good. So what's actually going on there? Well, that's a real question. And many things about itch are not very well understood. The thing about itch is that it compels scratching as a reflex. And there aren't very many other touches that do. In other words, pain compels protective responses, but itch compels scratching in particular. And we don't

know for sure, but our best evolutionary guess is that itch developed as a protective response to infestation. That is to say from insects or worms crawling on you that might be disease vectors. And for many years, people argued, is itch really a unique touch sensation or is it just a blend of other things? So to give you an example, heat and cold and pain and vibration are all unique individual touch sensations with their own dedicated neural sensors. Whereas clamminess, for example, is a touch blend. It's a mixture of yielding pressure and cold together. And so people argued, is itch a blend of touches or is there a dedicated itch sensor or is maybe itch just like a little bit of pain and a little bit of fine touch that

are mixed together and we call that itch. And the indications from some very recent experiments in mice are that there actually are some dedicated sensors for itch. So itch probably is its own unique sense. And one of the most salient features of itch is that it's socially transmissible. So if you watch people scratching, then you start to feel a little itchy and you start scratching yourself. And when you think about it, for most of our evolutionary past, we lived outside in small hunter-gatherer bands. And in that situation, if the person next to you starts scratching, it's actually probably a pretty good idea for you to start scratching too. Right. So it signals there may be something around that's not just affecting one person, I guess.

Right. So if we kind of zoom the lens out here and start to come full circle a bit, you know, the name of this is Good Life Project. And what we really explore on a regular basis is, are the elements, physiologically, neurologically, psychologically, an absolutely critical ingredient of your ability to live a good life. But it's something that we really don't explore all that often. Well, it's really true. And I think the contribution of touch to quality of life is particularly acute among the elderly. So, if you're in a situation, maybe you've lost a long-term partner, maybe you live in an institution, maybe your kids don't live far away. Well, you know, you're going to be in a situation where you're not experiencing loving touch very much, if at all. And we know that in these environments, even massage from a stranger, can be enormously beneficial. It can help retain

cognitive capacity, improve mood, lower stress hormone levels, improve overall health. And so, you know, most people in middle age, not everyone, but a lot of people in middle age are getting a fair bit of social touch. But this becomes harder to do for a lot of folks in the later stages of life. And I think while we want to pay attention to appropriate social touch throughout the lifespan, I think that's one area that deserves particular scrutiny. Yeah, that's so fascinating. Is there, I mean, I guess I'm wondering what the intervention is. Well, there are several interventions. One of them is to let old folks have sex with each other in a nursing home, even if they're demented.

And this has been a policy change that most nursing homes haven't done, but there are a few, including one in Riverdale in the Bronx that has really been the leader here, and they found that it's enormously beneficial. But even things like bringing in a hired massage therapist once a week to treat people has a big benefit. Even allowing pets and having people touch their dog or their cat is enormously beneficial. But we know that in an institutional setting, people are allergic. You can't always have dogs or cats. And so there was this great solution that was developed in Japan, an animatronic fur seal named Paro. And when you

bring this into some of these elder care facilities, there's actually a significant benefit from petting Paro, this animatronic fur seal as well. That's so fascinating. So it's not even, and people were aware that this thing was not a legitimate animal. Yes. I mean, maybe not everyone was. Some of the folks might have been demented. Sure. They didn't quite get it. But I don't think being utterly fooled by it is necessary for it to be efficacious. So interesting, which really speaks to the emotional side of it as well.

It is. We're hardwired to bond through touch, and we're hardwired to do with other people, and to some extent, we're hardwired to do with pets. So let's come entirely full circle here. There's a question that I like to wrap up with everybody. You're somebody who's spent a good bit of your life researching and studying, exploring as well as writing and sharing, and gotten exposure to extraordinary people, extraordinary research and ideas. So if I were to offer up the term to live a good life, and you thought about through your lens what that means to you, I'm curious what comes up. I think what comes up for me is the notion that there are a lot of pleasures in life and touches involved in some of those.

Some of them we call vices, although I'm not sure that they should be. Food, sex, certain drugs, gambling. Others we call virtues, generosity, learning, exercise, meditation. But all of these things activate the brain's pleasure circuit. All of them help you to lead a better life. And if you can take your pleasure broadly and in moderation, mixing your virtues and vices, then I think that's a fine recipe for a good life. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. It was fun.

Hey, thanks so much for listening. We love sharing real unscripted conversations and ideas that matter. And if you enjoy that too, and if you enjoy what we're up to, I'd be so grateful if you would take just a few seconds and rate and review the podcast. It really helps us get the word out. You can actually do that now right from the podcast app on your phone. If you have an iPhone, you just click on the reviews tab and take a few seconds and jam over there. And if you haven't yet subscribed while you're there, then make sure you hit the subscribe

button while you're at it. And then you'll be sure to never miss out on any of our incredible guests or conversations or riffs. And for those of you, our awesome community who are on other platforms, any love that you might be able to offer sharing our message would just be so appreciated. Until next time, this is Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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