Post COVID-19 world: The dying power of touch?

Early life experiences in our lives are intrinsically linked to touch. A research indicates, for instance, that baby rats with high-licking mothers have lower levels of stress hormones. Coetaneous stimulation is essential for the adequate organic and behavioral development of the organism. Newborn animals must be licked if they are to survive (otherwise they are at risk of dying of a functional failure of the genitourinary system and/or the gastrointestinal system).

In humans, this licking is replaced by a long period of labor, during which the contractions of the uterus stimulate the fetal skin. Infants who are not adequately touched after birth often suffer tremendously, sometimes even dying as a result. This suggests that healthy children are directly proportional to touching mothers. Blood relations are not key: adoptive mothers can perform the same tasks with similar effects. Why I am sharing this insightful research is because one of our five senses is under siege and staring at a partial extinction!

Touch has been one of the senses least researched but the power of touch cannot be denied. With even a light touch our body becomes a medium of expression communicating to ourselves and others too.

Touch has been an intrinsic part of the language of love and hatred. It has been proven through sensory compensation hypothesis, and there is evidence that practice can aid touch which can then become the eyes for those who cannot see along with their ears.

For visually impaired, sound and touch are their eyes. For those who are both deaf and blind, their only way to see the world is through touch. It has been scientifically proven that whenever one of your senses is taken away or not present at the time of birth itself, your other senses get stronger and compensate for the loss.

The book “Politics of Touch” by Erin Manning looks at touch not just as one of the senses but its interplay between living beings, living beings and non-living beings, humans and varied elements of nature and takes us through the experiential journey of touch beginning with the dance form tango which has a marvellous fusion of listening, feeling, touching and body movements.

Amidst this listening and responding, the language of touch plays a pivotal role with the background music adding to the sensation. Tango has encouraged communication amongst cultures and communities across the world because it mostly begins between two strangers. This touch at best is improvised in that moment. Most of the times, there is not even any improvisation. Like that visually impaired who is banging his stick on the pedestrian way staring towards the traffic waiting for someone to respond with his voice or with a gentle touch to say, “yes I can help you cross the road.”

Immediately, in a fraction of a second, an informal agreement gets executed and the person makes him cross the road. In this whole transaction, there is exchange of sensations, formation of trust and execution.

To touch entails acknowledging the risks associated with the unknown toward whom I reach when I touch. That is where tact is different from touch like in pre-inscribed tactile paths at metro stations and on pedestrian ways. When you do it tact-fully, you zero the risk which is 100% in case of touch. In case of visually impaired and deaf-blind persons, the ability to walk or do things tactfully is taken away due to the absence of sight and more so in the case of deaf-blind who cannot even hear. Only when I see a crowd is when I will want to check why it is gathered. In case they are fighting, as a visually impaired, I will not go there because I know something is wrong and I heard it. Someone who is deaf-blind cannot even hear which makes it impossible for him to know till he touches something with all the risk involved or gets support of technology to visualize a situation in his mind.

That is where, in post COVID times, one wonders how would two strangers trust each other to hold respective bodies with confidence and flow without any fear, in a Tango? How would a visually impaired trust a stranger to help him board a bus? How would they go to a museum and touch artefacts to experience what it looks like if it has been touch by an infect person? Whether they are congenitally, adventitiously or late blind, they all have no option but to use touch as a sense to steer through their daily lives. Even in today’s times, they already carry a tag of “sympathy” and most live a life of rejection.

The risk taken by visually impaired or deaf-blind has already been very high whenever they step out of the boundaries of their house. With a disease which gets transmitted through touch or from the droplets of a sneeze, living life for people who use touch as their eyes will become very difficult.

Only nature can tell how this gap lacking ‘human touch’ among humans will be re-filled.