Skin Deep

David Raney

“It eased him to push through the crowds of people. The noise, the rank stinks, the shouldering contact of human flesh. . .”

—Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

I was pleased to learn recently that in 2018 the United Kingdom appointed a loneliness minister. Also a bit chagrinned, for while the title provides a nice contrast to standard bureaucratic blather (Associate Envoy for Inferential Logistics), it was sad to realize such a position was needed. The new minister, Baroness Barran, urged “everyone who may be feeling lonely or isolated to reach out to someone. . . get in touch.”

When Japan followed suit three years later, naming Tetsushi Sakamoto its first minister of loneliness, COVID was upon us. “Imagine this,” wrote C. Pam Zhang less than a month into the pandemic:

It is one year ago and we are still hugging our friends, still swaying en masse from subway poles, still stopping for golden-lit happy hours at outdoor cafes where we lick food from our fingers and laugh in each other’s faces and never disinfect our hands.

Post pandemic, many of us are still imagining. During COVID lockdown, Chloe Shaw began an essay by asking, “Remember when it didn’t take risk (only love) . . . to hug your mother, your father, your friend, your friend’s husband, your child, your dog?” Maybe, but since spring 2020 I’m not always certain if I’m remembering or imagining. Or if those are entirely different things.

During COVID I kept in touch with friends and family as much as I could, as you probably did. But how much real touch do we mean when we toss off that phrase? Email, text, Zoom—none of it involves warm skin, any more than phone, fax, or telegraph did in days of yore. Three years of keeping as far apart as possible, and headlines about “touch hunger” and “touch starvation,” made me wonder how often we touched friends and loved ones, never mind strangers, on any given day before COVID supposedly changed everything.

There are individual differences, obviously. We’re extraverts, introverts, and every mix in the middle. Maybe you come from a huggy family, maybe not. But either way you know shoulder grippers, backslappers, and knuckle tappers, and you know people who tend to eschew touch except in intimate relations. As Shaw says, “We all have those people in our lives we hug and those we don’t—both because of personal preferences and societal norms.”

Without resorting to stereotype, there are cultural differences too. So-called high-contact cultures of the Middle East, Latin America, and South America tend to stand closer and touch more, greeting by rubbing noses or kissing cheeks. Far Eastern cultures tend to bow more and embrace less, with North America and Northern Europe somewhere in between.

As with most generalities, though, these don’t always fall out as you’d expect. In a 1960s study, researchers observed how many times people in café conversations touched. High-contact Puerto Rico came in first with 180 per hour (once every twenty seconds), while Florida and France, both ostensibly moderate, averaged 2 and 110 touches per hour, respectively.

Another example is Japan, where family and friends don’t hug a great deal, but there are ear-cleaning establishments and “cuddle cafes,” the whole point of which is nonsexual touch. And when Robin Dunbar ran a study out of Oxford and Finland’s Aalto University to arrive at a multicultural “touchability index,” he remarked: “We hadn’t expected the Finns to turn out to be the most cuddly people. . . or that the Italians are almost as un-cuddly as the Brits.”

It's easy to assume the British might bring up the rear on such scales (stiff upper lip, don’t you know), but a recent experiment with blindfolded UK subjects found that “longer hugs are considered more pleasant” than short ones, even when the hugger is a stranger: “Subjects liked five- or ten-second embraces better than one-second squeezes.” And in a global touch test, fully 75 percent of UK participants reported a positive attitude to touch.

“We’re wired to connect with other people on a basic physical level,” says Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner. Neuroscientist Helena Wasling agrees: “Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a tactile person, touch is embedded in the social structure of our lives.” Wired or not, though, most of us touch less than we think we do. As Tiffany Field, head of the Touch Research Institute (yes, there is one), said in an interview two years before COVID, “I was in two airports yesterday, and there’s no touching going on, even couples who were obviously traveling together. The kids are all on smartphones and so are their parents, and little two-year-olds on iPads.”

A pre-pandemic study spanning 112 countries confirms this, with more than half of respondents saying there was already too little touch in their lives. Maybe COVID didn’t make us touch less, just think about it more. In October 2020 a BBC commentator remarked of physical contact, “Only in its absence have we noticed its worth.” We live by touch, and need it more than we know.

“To touch can be to give life,” said Michelangelo, and it holds true well beyond the Sistine ceiling. Pre-term infants who get three fifteen-minute touch therapy sessions a day for just a week, for instance, gain 47 percent more weight. On the darker side, a 1930s trend to isolate infants in sterile environments was short-lived because so were the babies: mortality rates rocketed to 40 percent. Even a simple pat on the back from a doctor can boost survival rates for patients with complex diseases.

We know something about how this works. In adults, touch releases stress-reducing serotonin, cortisol, and dopamine, plus oxytocin, the “love hormone,” which in nonsexual encounters increases the chances that “a person will treat you like family, even if you just met.” Touch also activates the vagus nerve, which cannot be consciously controlled but oversees a broad array of bodily functions like mood, digestion, and heart rate.

Another example is massage, which relieves not only muscle tension and pain but depression, as well as increasing the natural “killer cells” on the front lines of our immune system. A University of Miami study found that massage may be even better to give than to receive, as therapists benefit from “stimulating the pressure receptors in the hand and their elbows or whatever they’re massaging with.” Toward the end of life, too, research with Alzheimer’s patients has shown that massage can have “huge effects on getting them to relax and make emotional connections.”

Touch may be the sense we think about least but depend on most. Adam Gopnik calls it “the unsung sense.” It’s our secret superpower, secret even from ourselves. You have special nerves, for example, called CT afferents in almost every inch of your skin which, when stroked slowly, send signals to the part of your brain devoted to social bonding and emotional equilibrium. Remarkably, even people who suffer from a very rare condition called “touch blindness” respond to this. Doctors for a woman named G.L., for instance, say she can’t feel anything at all, but “if you caress her forearm, or her leg or another area of skin, she can tell roughly where it is and she knows it’s pleasant. . . She has retained a different, emotional touch system.” Think how important this has to be for evolution to go to such lengths.

Other proof crops up in settings as varied as schoolrooms, restaurants, and basketball courts. When teachers in France pat their students in a friendly way, they are three times more likely to speak up in class. NBA teams sharing hugs, chest bumps, and head slaps do much better than teams that don’t, and an incidental touch from a waitress returning change will increase her tip significantly, even if neither of you consciously registers it. We don’t have to. Our bodies remember.

“Full fathom five thy father lies” goes the famous alliterative line from The Tempest, meaning Ferdinand’s father has drowned, his body thirty feet beneath the waves. Since this is Shakespeare, though, it’s no great shock to learn he hasn’t, and it isn’t. In literature as in life, truth often lies elsewhere. Here, it’s in that ancient word fathom, which today refers to a depth of six feet but originally meant “outstretched arms,” a synonym for embrace. (Measure yourself from fingertip to fingertip; it’ll be close.) A few years after the Bard died it took on the meaning non-sailors use today: to get to the bottom of something, to understand.

The play’s final act offers embraces for all. Traitors repent, the true king returns, and characters know each other in ways they couldn’t have while drifting apart, untouched, alone. Mystery and magic play large roles because there’s so much of both in our attempts to fathom ourselves and those other inscrutable humans we share the world with. As Gopnik puts it, our skins aren’t “hides hung around our inner life, they are the inner life, pushed outside. What we touch we are.”

It turns out there’s a reason that we used the word “touched” for so long to describe people who overlap with magic, or madness, or the gods. That meaning, as old as the skin-contact one, expresses a move beyond the human in the most human way we know.

David Raney is a writer and editor living near Greenville, South Carolina, with his family and a Jeep-sized dog named Oscar, who writes most of his best stuff. His essays have appeared in dozens of journals and have been listed four times in Best American Essays.