Radio 4’s The Touch Test as described in their own words is: an online questionnaire developed by Goldsmiths’ Professor Michael Banissy in collaboration with Professor Alice Gregory, and UCL’s Professor Aikaterini Fotopoulou, commissioned by Wellcome Collection.
The Touch test was carried out before COVID-19 became the dominating force across the globe but the results have been released at an interesting juncture. Societies are hyper aware of touch! The touch test looked at attitudes from forty thousand participants in over one hundred countries giving the team an expansive data set with interesting findings discussed by Claudia Hammond and Professor Michael Banissy, Radio One DJ Greg James, philosopher and neuroscientist Ophelia Deroy, comedian and founder of Tourettesheros Jess Thom and playwright V creator of The Vagina Monologues on BBC Radio 4’s The Results program. I listened to the results and here are my thoughts on the program. I do hope you too can listen, there is a link to the program on BBC Sounds at the end of the article.
The show selected five results and the discussion had a great impact on me. Here I am sharing with you my thoughts and musings. Until this moment I had limited my time to question and assess the impact that COVID has been having on my professional and personal relationships, possibility because I have been in a mode of getting on with it and adapting or possibly because in truth I feel deprived of touch and I don’t want to dwell on it too much or I feel sad!. “I am a hugger… I get charged up by other people,’ Greg James said on the program. Me too Greg! I want to hold my friends and give them great big hugs without a sense of worry or fear or judgment or wrongdoing. This is not easy in a time when we are being told to bump elbows. What I crave most is music and dancing, literally shaking off the day as my dance teacher so often says. There is nothing quite like dancing with friends to lift my spirits.
Industries across the board have been impacted by this virus and it is certainly a bizarre time to be a massage therapist; clients want touch, the government wants to control touch, I want to give touch but too feel at times like I am pushing against a ‘new normal’ which I fear is touch depravation. The idea of promoting massage at the moment feels wrong, I don’t think it is on a personal level, I think we need touch more than ever, but at the societal level it is what we are been told to avoid and I am unsure to what end. I can work, I can work safely and I want those who haven’t been touched to come and receive safe touch from bodyworkers because too many people already don’t get enough!
54% of those who took part in The Touch Test reported that they do not get enough touch. Only 3% reported that they get too much. Humans need this, touch is our first sense to develop at around 8 weeks in the womb, this is our primary sense and we use touch to learn and keep us safe in our world. As the program rightly points out touch grounds us and gives us a sense of reality.
Previous studies have explored the impact of touch on development in mice, in humans in monkeys, each time the findings show that positive touch (play, grooming, cradling) all contribute to the healthy development of a mammal. Touch between mother and child and siblings literally impact on the development of the brain and other tissues. Beyond the physiological impact of touch is the psychological impact. The Touch Test found that there is a strong correlation between a sense of wellbeing and those who receive positive touch. Touch was reported to reduce perceived senses of loneliness. Again this has been supported by previous studies looking at touch. Library users were asked about their experience in a library and during the experiment the librarian was asked to make some kind of physical connection with the library user. Those who had some moment of physical contact reported a better or more significant library experience.
Touch grounds us in our experience of the world and engaging with out senses such as touch and smell, sight and taste can all calm our anxious minds taking the focus from the amygdala into the prefrontal cortex.
V shares her experience of holding a friend who she had a past falling out with: they locked eyes and held one another in a long embrace with no need for words. She describes; “…in that hug was the whole story, the hurt the pain and the reconciliation and we didn’t need to say a word at the end of it.’ That is just it, sometimes a hug or a pat on the back, a jovial shoulder push or high five conveys enough. Children can’t resist from touching one another whether it be tag, leapfrog or the endless other contact playground games. Babies and toddlers who want to grab everything, they have to because this is how their brains are developing. This is enhanced in teenage years with pushing, shoving, chasing and to adults its blind obvious flirting but it is too enhancing the bond and sense of connection to a community which young people are fully invested in. We don’t loose our want for touch in adulthood we simply have to regulate our touch to fit in with expectations. English people are renowned for our propriety and tend not to touch so much as people in other cultures.
Holding my friends in an embrace can convey a thousand words. Words can be exhausting and in times of struggle and pain I have often found that touch that brings me comfort and charges up my energy and strength. The program discusses for some people touch is not so welcome. Greg James discusses greeting styles with the England cricket team from the handshake, to the Viking hug, to the double pat release, you’ll have to listen to hear about this it is a wonderful conversation that will get you thinking about your greeting style. The panel agreed that consensual touch is important and how perhaps in the COVID world there will be an amplified awareness of consent and checking in with individual boundaries and how each of us want to be touched. I worry about those who don’t check in, the mentality where people do what they think is right, they don’t have the confidence to check in, they fear the boundaries or don’t know how to explore them. The hug becomes lost and people avoid touch and worry to ask for it. Is this going to be a time where we see a positive revival of touch, an age of informed consent? Or might we be moving toward a time of even greater touch deprivation and anxiety around touch?
The survey found 72% of participants had a positive attitude to touch so it is a clear that not everyone likes it and it will be interesting to see how COVID offers an opportunity for some people to feel more comfortable than ever before – finally no more unwanted hugs or finger crushing handshakes! As a woman I can safely say I won’t miss some of the hugs or unwanted kisses I have received from men as a form of greeting. Interesting results from the test are that women relate to touch as self care touch outside family whereas men like to be touched more by their partners or friends and strangers. There is much more to explored around gender and touch and what feels acceptable, I can think of some interesting starting points but that is not for now. The survey said that each sex prefers to be touched by the opposite sex. This is interesting and maybe I missed something because I feel much more comfortable and safe with touch from my female friends. I wonder how you feel?
What is touch in the COVID-19 world and what will we see as a knock-on effect. Touch in education was briefly touched upon in the program and this got me thinking about children in schools and how they are being affected. Learning to share toys, take turns, bring and shares, passing objects around. Do you remember all this from your education? I used to love the toys we used in maths to help us learn about numbers. I never understood what was being said but I loved linking the plastic blocks together!
Whatever the world does look like ahead I hope to never loose the hug and certainly not massage. My physical and mental wellbeing are deeply rooted in my sense of touch whether that is a hug from a friend, an embrace from my fur coat, a scratch with a friend’s dog or a massage treatment. I need to feel. How many animals have been purchased or adopted during lockdown to support the need for touch and cuddles that is fundamental to our being?
I leave you with your own musings on touch in your life. What does touch mean to you? How does it inform your sense of self or your surroundings?
I hope you get an opportunity to listen to the Radio 4 program yourself. If you’re not getting enough positive touch I urge you to think about where to find it and perhaps consider incorporating regular bodywork into your schedule.
With love, light and musings on touch.
Natalie
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000n5xx - Follow this link to the BBC Sounds to listen to the program