Touch and Goosebumps
In chapter 19 “Touch” of Principals of Neural Science, the authors highlight the magnificent feat of engineering that is the human hand. I’ve increasingly appreciated this as I keep up with Tesla’s attempts to replicate it in their Optimus humanoid robot. It turns out it’s incredibly difficult! The hand does so much more than pick things up. It connects us to our external world through a combination of motor action and sensory perception. It also allows me to rapidly select from about 40 characters distributed across a keyboard while I type this post!
The chapter mainly discusses receptors in the hand which are distributed at various levels in the skin. It is the combination of different receptor activations which tell us about the type of pressure we are experiencing on the surface. What’s really impressive is that the brain is able to decode these various pressures to produce conscious experience of textures, mental shapes of held objects, and even the emotion of a person who’s hand we’re holding.
By stroking the skin, we can activate a huge number of surface receptors without the stimulation of receptors at depth. This unique combination can produce a chill (goosebumps) rippling across the body. We get these chills not just from touch sensations, but also emotional insight. We’ve all had the experience of patterns connecting in front of us and that eerie chill runs up the spine. These chills are a fascinating feature of human biology!
There is a non-profit research center in Santa Monica called the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies (IACS) which is studying the application of chills for the treatment of depression (among many other far out and surprisingly effective and rigorous approaches). They first developed a device which augments chills which people are already having. The inside scoop is that some early subjects were able to manifest chills on demand after training with the device! After this, they are testing whether the application of these chills are able to treat depression and results will be coming soon. Keep up and learn more here.
The touch receptors in our skin provide a valuable map of the world around us and the shapes and intentions of the objects within it. While not all objects are kind, a gentle touch can produce a biologically engrained calming sensation of chills. These chills can come from insight, which is often described as spritual. It is possible there is a relationship between the comforting touch that integrates millions of activated receptors and the comforting insight that integrates millions of neuronal representations (ideas) in the brain. Perhaps this is a feature of connection and integration that is more fundamental to the nervous system. If you can, give someone the physical sensation of comforting touch, and stay alert for the moments which ideas overlap to produce a special insight. These sensations may play a role in your healthy engagement with the world around you.
With love,
Michael
