To primatologists, the importance of touch is no surprise. Nonhuman primates touch each other extensively during grooming. And while grooming is ostensibly about hygiene, it would take only about ten minutes of grooming a day for an animal to stay clean. Instead, some species spend hours on it. Why? Remember those grooming cliques? In nonhuman primates, social grooming is important for maintaining social relationships. Touch is our most highly developed sense when we are born, and it remains a fundamental mode of communication throughout a baby’s first year and an important influence throughout a person’s life.
Subscription Center
See what we're tweeting about
4 Comments
Add CommentI've also experienced this in life. Being French, I usually hug a woman when I first meet her. I thought that touch signals a non-threatening 'comfort zone'. The defense barriers are dropped.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, there may be a chicken and egg scenario. We may pick up on facial or body signals that first allow the casual 'touch'. Those we touch were more likely in our activity criteria than those that were not.
Re the article...no Frenchman in the world would not take advantage of the phone numbers he received during the experiment.
Great article. There is a vast untapped market of painfully introverted scientists, engineers and mathematicians out there, hungry for a logical motivation to make an ass of themselves. This might just be it. I smell another great Mlodinow book ;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis kind of "soft touchings" are good when you think showing intentions of obtaining a date or another kind of intimate connection with the other person, as skin is our largest and more easily excitable erotic zone. The issue is that many fellows use touching as a way to obtain in an automatic and irreflexive way a positive feeling inside you towards them, and this is somehow bringing you down to an animal or sexual object condition, and opening your mind's firewall to being abused. Some saints had as the final step in withdrawing from unnecessary bonds with the material world, refraining from any kind of touch, and Jesus after resurrection said to Maria Magdalena "Don't touch me", meaning probably "Don't paw me". Touching is good with your wife or husband, hugging is good sometimes with your kids, anything that goes beyond this can enter dangerous fields, too much intimacy is probably worse than no intimacy at all, the medicine Nobel prize winner Santiago Ramon y Cajal discovered that brain cells do have membranes as barriers, and are not a meta-unit of fusioned cells as some believed before, and there are lots of people trying to destroy the "membranes" that isolate you from the outer world in their own benefit; the concept of an organic society you can find in authors so different as Spengler, that suffered critics from Freud, and the law expert Kelsen would be regarded today by many as totalitarian.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCudos, SHinyMind. Perhaps by touching others, the "touchers" made and released their own pheromones that made the "touchee" more attracted to them. I mean, the % moved from 10% to 20%------not insignificant, but not monumental either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this