I have noticed that our sense of touch is falling out of fashion. For various unrelated reasons (technology, urbanisation, psychology / society) we are less likely to operate things by mechanical touching, to have tactile experiences of our natural environment, or to touch other humans outside of a sexual context. With a slight unease about these developments floating around my mind, I was very excited to discover the recent paper from researcher in Finland who have studied the "touch biographies" of volunteers to study what the interhuman touch meant to people (in Finland), and I jumped at the opportunity to use this as a peg to cover the wider importance of feeling things (and organisms, and people) and the question of whether and why our feel for our world is in decline.
The resulting feature is out now:
Are we losing touch with our world?
Current Biology Volume 29, issue 8, pages R265-R268, April 22, 2019
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A tactile experience of nature and wildlife is increasingly rare as urbanisation and technology progress. (Photo: Asinno/Flickr.)
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