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A punch in the face hurts and causes the lip to bleed.
Severe pinching will leave bruises.
Well-intentioned touches are hardly less serious: when one person's fingers slide gently over another's arm, when naked bodies nestle against one another, when noses, cheeks, entire halves of the face rub against each other - then our organism generates feelings that are among the most beautiful of our existence .
Physical closeness promotes cohesion, relieves pain and stress and, thanks to its arousing and stimulating properties, is the basis of our sexuality.
"Touch stimuli change the biochemistry of the brain in a dramatic and positive way", says Martin Grunwald from the haptics research laboratory at the University of Leipzig in the ARTE documentary "The power of gentle touch".
Electrical impulses to the brain
Research on touch stimuli was patchy until the 1990s.
A turning point was the discovery of a special kind of skin system.
Today we know that every touch activates millions of receptors and sends electrical impulses, so-called microcurrents, via a dense network of nerve fibers to different regions of the brain within milliseconds.
Specialized nerves then trigger the release of messenger substances, i.e. hormones and neurotransmitters, which ensure growth-promoting processes and other positive effects.
"In this respect, the result of a touch stimulus is always a whole-body reaction," says Grunwald.
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Researchers found another missing piece of the puzzle in the late 2000s when they identified a second nervous system that was difficult to locate - consisting of so-called C-tactile cells, also known as stroking fibers.
Their signals take one to two seconds to reach the brain and are aimed specifically at areas that are responsible for sensations, self-perception and reflection.
C-tactile cells communicate whether a touch is pleasant - or unpleasant, for example if the wrong person is caressing you.
“I think that's what holds social groups together.
Touch regulates the social contact of groups through reward, ”says Francis McGlone, neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University, in the ARTE documentary.
Thanks to the nervous system, the brain can also distinguish whether a person is touching himself - or is being touched.
Since the latter leads to completely different processes in the body, the question arises: Can skin-to-skin contact be artificially imitated?
The first technical solutions for distance contact via the Internet are already available.
A “soft, sensitive skin interface” is what John Rogers, physicist and chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, calls an artificial skin he helped develop.
It is stuck to the receiver like a plaster and communicates wirelessly.
Small electrical elements convert computer signals from the sender's touchscreen into pressure and vibration pulses.
Virtual caressing in real time?
Not quite.
Because the artificial skin cannot simulate gentle touches.
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Source: Arte
The documentary on television:
The science documentary "The Power of Gentle Touch" runs on Wednesday, March 3rd at 9:40 pm and can be found in the Arte media library until May 31, 2021.