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What holds a community together is amazingly similar to what we are as humans.

Such an insight may seem banal in retrospect, but in retrospect one is always smarter.

If, on the other hand, you had asked most people a little over a year ago what they and the world might be missing most one day, the answer would probably rarely have been: touch.

A handshake, a kiss on the left, a kiss on the right, a hug - for a long time it all seemed natural to us.

Then came a virus, just 100 nanometers in size.

Since then, we have known how great the longing for skin contact can be - with loved ones, with friends and acquaintances, sometimes even with strangers.

Scientists call this yearning for touch.

The Arte documentation "Skin to Skin - A Brief Cultural History of Touch" tells of how this hunger shaped our everyday life long before Corona.

Among other things, you learn that there has been a lack for a while, a kind of loose contact with other people.

This is the result of a study by University College London, in which around 40,000 people from 112 countries were asked about their relationship to touch between January and March 2020.

A little more than half of the respondents stated that they missed skin contact in everyday life.

Just one month later, shortly after the first lockdowns began in Europe, a similar study by the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich came to a value of 61 percent.

Whether in Germany, France, Italy or the USA: In the meantime there are studies almost everywhere in the world what contact bans do to people as a result of the corona pandemic.

And almost everywhere, a growing majority report an ever-increasing hunger for closeness - a hunger that is normally satisfied by leaning against a friend in search of consolation, patting a friend on the back with appreciation, the elderly parents in the Arm takes.

Humans manage to forego all of this every now and then.

But when hunger becomes permanent, we find it painful.

And just as not eating weakens our bodies, so too does lack of physical contact.

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Doctors are now observing a significant increase in depression and cardiovascular diseases, which they attribute to the corona-related lack of closeness to other people.

It is precisely this closeness to others that regulates our own physical and mental wellbeing - based on complex biochemical processes that researchers have only recently deciphered.

For years, neurologists, psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists have been warning against a disembodiment for which the human being as a social being was not made.

Even in pre-Corona times, most adults in Europe only had a few minutes of physical contact a day.

Digitization, the growing need for mobility, but also the tendency towards isolation are responsible.

Nowhere is this more evident than in living: In Germany, for example, the area that a person can claim at home has more than tripled between 1950 and today.

The original 14 has become 45 square meters.

But because contact with others now harbors the risk of infection, the supposedly most superior mammal suddenly seeks more contact with other mammals.

Breeders have been reporting a real dog and cat boom since the beginning of 2020.

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Some observers believe that they recognize a certain irony in this: humanity, which since the beginning of the Enlightenment has always followed the “Cogito ergo sum” of the philosopher and mathematician René Descartes and consequently has increasingly placed thinking and the spirit at the center of its being has to recognize that the thinking I must feel the closeness of others in order to be.

It seems like the beginning of the end of a disembodied epoch.

Like a much-needed reminder that touching and touching is not just any sensory experience, but the sensory experience itself: the first human sense to form in the womb and the last to leave us.

Even if at the end of their life a person can barely see and hear, possibly only with difficulty speak, taste and smell - he can still feel the world.

Social distancing, telephone calls and video calls do not help beyond the existential dependence on other people.

It is the reason why singles and people living alone report that they feel "somehow lost" in the pandemic.

Because in a way they actually are without the regular contact of others, however random and fleeting they may be.

But man is not made for solitude in all his vulnerability.

To be alone without feeling the closeness and protection of others is stressful and we react with excessive attention, sensitivity, fearfulness, and sometimes even aggressiveness, say cognitive researchers.

In the middle of the pandemic, nobody can say how the lack of contact will affect in the long term.

What we have known for a long time: It is not only individuals who depend on touch.

Studies show that sports teams in which slaps and short hugs are the norm are more team-minded and more successful.

It should be similar in work groups and in any case among friends and acquaintances.

Small sideline contacts keep human communities together.

They act like a kind of putty.

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Whether this binding agent is lost after the pandemic, whether society is drifting further apart or moving closer together - that must first be seen, say some researchers.

Perhaps we will also experience that “renaissance of touch” that Laura Crucianelli recently prophesied.

From the perspective of the cognitive researcher from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the pandemic has left invisible scars.

A kind of phantom pain, triggered by lost hugs, missed handshakes, a lack of appreciative pat on the shoulder.

“We cannot afford to unlearn the language of touch,” warns Crucianelli.

“That is why the post-pandemic world must be about how we meet the need to feel other people again.” Everyone has the right to touch and the right to dream of a reality in which the rest of us are Being close to people again.

Source: Arte

The documentary on television:

The science documentary “Skin to Skin - A Brief Cultural History of Touch” runs on Sunday, February 28th at 10:25 pm and can be found in the Arte media library until May 28, 2021.