Unlike our other senses, touch acts on our feelings as a personal sensation generated within ourselves. For example, when seeing beautiful autumn leaves, we do not think of the effect of feeling that they are pretty as being something that occurs within ourselves. However, when we stroke a pet, we feel calmer and find even just looking at it soothing. This is because touch and vision stimulate each other, causing feelings in our brain. Stimulating emotions in this way is one element of the sense of touch.

A crying baby will eventually stop wailing when its mother picks it up and cuddles it. This is because the physical contact activates the parasympathetic nervous system and makes the child relax. There is said to be a possibility that hugs and similar forms of contact are starting to function as a communication tool. Stimulating the sense of touch through skin-to-skin contact and the like is important at any age. For seniors in particular, touch has a health preservation effect, not only due to the movement of the body, but also by stimulating the skin.

2020 has been the year of social distancing and fist bumps. In a society in which COVID-19 is limiting physical contact, what meaning will the sense of touch come to have in our lives in the future? As research into technologies capable of replicating the sense of touch progresses, shedding light on the mechanisms by which touch is processed in the brain and turned into feelings, we will come to realize that real-life experiences and haptic impression are rendered indivisible via the mind.

Touch is the most primitive of the five senses, which organisms gained at an early stage in their evolution as a sense essential to defending themselves. It has unique features from a biological perspective, such as the ability to detect even subtle differences. Touch is an intricate sense with the power to reach deep inside us. Physically touching something or being touched can soothe or relax us, and our experience of it is also influenced by differences in sex and cultural background.