Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind

by David J. Linden

c.2015, Viking ; 28.95 / $33.00 Canada; 261 pages

Something’s wrong, and you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Everything feels so drab, so negative. It’s Murphy’s Law on overdrive, nothing in your day is going right, and your mood just took another nosedive.

Looks like someone needs a hug, and in the new book Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind by David J. Linden, you’ll see why that could truly help.

Shaking hands, patting someone on the shoulder, caressing a cheek, or grabbing a wrist; There is no mistaking the meaning behind any of those actions but why do we understand them, even if they happened wordlessly?

Skin, says Linden. It’s a social medium. We humans (as well as most mammals) are born needing to be nurtured and touched: researchers believe it’s the first sense we developed as fetuses, and if we’re denied its pleasure, “the consequences are dramatic.” Children who are touch-deprived in infancy show higher incidences of obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes later in life.

But social glue isn’t the only reason scientists are touching upon this sense.

Chances are right now, for instance, that you’re touching something – the Birmingahm Medical News you hold as you read this - and you’re doing it almost automatically, with very little mental effort. You can thank touch sensors and nerve fibers for that. Glabrous skin (that without hair, such as what’s on your lips, palms, and the bottoms of your feet) has a dense amount of sensors at its surface while hairy skin contains fewer sensors. The various sensors allow you to perform a multitude of actions, such as grabbing, retrieving, determining, and grasping, and they collect information that goes to your brain at different speeds, taking with it experiences, emotions, and context so you can act (or don’t overreact) to what your skin feels.

These sensors also help make a “touch map” inside the brain, which connects information being collected and identifies the source of the touch. While there’s still much to learn, scientists know that your personal touch map can be affected by aging and disease – and if you’re feeling touchy about that, take heart: they also say that maps can change through practiced sensory habits. Doesn’t that make you feel better?

If you could only have one sense, which would it be? Read Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind and your answer will be clear.

I only wish the book was, too.

In between illustrative stories that can completely capture interest, author David J. Linden immerses his readers in deep neurology, complete with scientific terms that could boggle a layman’s mind. We’re handed a lot here, including alphabet-soup language, and while that’s certainly not bad, it does mean that this book is best consumed slowly and in small bites with rapt attention.

Still, if you’re interested in the mechanics of your mind or you want to know why you itch and what you have in common with koalas, read this and you won’t be disappointed. Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind is a book to get your fingers on.