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**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. The interesting thing too I think is that when we're younger, we get touched a lot by our parents; we touch our parents a lot. So as we age, somehow obviously sexuality comes into play, and intimacy comes into play with touch, so as we get older and become more mature, touch becomes more purp... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** My example of a scenario like this that you just gave is with my son. When my son is super-upset or he's frantic for some reason, or he can't get his words out and he's just upset, I give him a big hug. And he sort of inhales, exhales, and just calms down in my arms (same with my wife), because ther... |
\[07:57\] But you're not always a kid, and you're not always a parent, so you're a team member on a professional team - basketball, a software team, an engineering team at a high-profile company, an individual that's a remote worker... Where does touch come into play in these scenarios that makes sense? So do you have ... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Well, sure. Like with anything, of course, there's guard rails and there's parameters... And really, I would say that there is personal preference, and that two people participate in what they allow or feel comfortable with. It's interesting, because someone said the fact is that there is a cu... |
Think about it like tickling. I would suspect that people have different preferences and levels of acceptability as it relates to tickling, and going "I'm okay with being tickled" or like "No. Dear God. I do no like it." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "...by anyone!" |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[laughs\] Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Not even my boss, but like anyone." You may have specific preferences like that. There's a thing that happens at tech conferences that I'll bring up, that is slightly interesting in the fact that it sort of identifies publicly, in a silent matter. Like, I don't have to walk around saying I have the... |
So there's these personal preferences you could put out there, and maybe in a work environment there's some sort of rules of engagement like "Okay, we understand that touch is important, and that team-based touching has better implications to deeper attachment, greater empathy", whatever the things might be... "But the... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Well, I think that because the way in which we're talking about this, we're getting at the way in which there's an emotional component to it... So I don't even know that you can say that there's generalities. I mean, even on a team, you still have individual relationships, and go "I might be m... |
Say for example you have a co-worker who despite your efforts at communicating clearly, of saying "Hey, when you come up to my desk, come alongside, or let me know. It bothers me, because I feel startled everytime you come up behind me", and they don't take that feedback and they continue to not do anything different. ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So it's to say that touch is very personal. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** It is. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm very touchy (to use a pun) when it comes to talking about it, because there are some people who have been touched inappropriately in their life, and they feel certain ways because of it, or uncomfortability with a co-worker, or anybody. And that's okay. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yes, yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:08\] But I think what we're trying to do is help people understand what touch is to being human, how it affects our brains, how it affects our relationships, the roles it plays, and how to reframe our thoughts on it around healthy ways of touching, and the ways it does really help interpersonal... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right. I love this quote by David Eagleman. He says "You can't touch something without being touched yourself." And even as we're thinking about this, I have the image always of like "My hand is the thing doing the touching." But I can touch things with my elbows... I mean, I think about one t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, so there's this sensory pathway, which gives us facts about the touch, like the pressure, location, or the fine texture, and then that second pathway processes the social and emotional information, determining more of the emotional content of the interpersonal touch. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** For example, walking in New York, where it's highly dense, and that people bump into each other as just a sort of way of life - I'm not processing that as a personal attack, or like the person was trying to touch me. So my response is likely very different, as I just was aware of the facts - I... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Slime... \[laughs\] Sweat slime. Yeah, that exchange that happens, you're like "That's kind of icky." So you may be uncomfortable with it, but it's not like an advance of some sort. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Sure. So that then affects my response. And this is why I think it's so helpful to have conversations around these topics, because when we know or understand more of what's going on internally, it allows us to make a different interpretation or understanding of the way in which what's going in... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know if this is a perfect example, but I think a dark room - to know where you're at in a dark room when you can't see anything, what might you do? You'd probably reach out your hand... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...begin to feel around, right? This sense of touch is sort of like your eyeballs in some cases, or the ability to see. And even with Braille, for example, and mentioning how there's two different pathways of understanding sensory and then emotion - you know, you don't read Braille with your elbow; ... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a multi-faceted sensory that we have. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. I think I've shared this before, but remember when I've talked through that experience of VR, wherein I went up the elevator and I had the opportunity to walk off a beautiful little wooden plank? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:01\] Right, yes... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** ...and the way in which I navigated it, because the information that one sense was telling me - what I could see and what I could hear - was alternative to other things that I knew. So I actually got down on the floor and touched the floor beside the plank to remind myself that there's still g... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One layer deeper to that then - how did it feel to see and hear something different than what you touched? Because when you touched the floor, it didn't feel like a plank in water, or empty space; it was -- |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Sure. It was the carpet. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...the carpet, or whatever. Exactly. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[laughs\] It was carpet, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So how did you react to the fact that you see something different than you feel? |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** This is so interesting... It calmed me down, because I was going on with it, like it was pleasant; I wasn't necessarily anxious. But when the doors opened and I saw the mountains and the skyscrapers and the birds - my brain started to tell me a different story. So that's when I got down and wa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Uff. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[laughs\] Yeah... So this is why it's super-important in recognizing how we process. So that first part, which tells us about the pressure, location and texture, this is the first place or first region of the brain that gets hit by our sensation of touch, and that is called the primary somato... |
Doctor Lindon - remember the doctor I've mentioned, who is a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins - says that it basically analyzes information through a series of processing stages that extract more and more complicated information. It's about figuring out the facts, and it uses sequential stages of processing t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Even so though, to pause there, to think like, okay, my brain has an association, not just with the notion of carpet, or colors of carpet, or how it visually looks, but I also have this notion of the framework of knowing that if I touch this, this feels like carpet. So there's a multi-sensory object... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not sure you can -- you can probably hear carpet by rubbing your feet on it or something like that, or wiping your hand around, so there's a multi-sensory attachment or designation to an object, or objects of the world. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. So I'm gonna dig a little deeper then to sort of talk through that grid or map that you're referencing as it relates to the brain. So if you can imagine, sensations come from the outside in. I sense. And the signal is from the touch receptors in my skin, which - my fingertips happen to h... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:27\] Yeah... It's interesting, it's crazy how deep this goes, even down to the memory graph of objects to registering emotion, or the amount of receptors to convey back to my somatosensory cortex etc. You know, what kind of touch this is; is it an infraction on my personal beliefs? All this hap... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** It does, it does. This is why it's so crazy. So how neurologists look at this, the sensitivity we have, is looking at the minimum distance between the two points on somebody's skin, where a person can identify different distinct stimuli, as opposed to just one. So if I move something on one pa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Who would have known or thought that touch could be so dynamic? I guess it would make sense, but digging into the science of it, to me, is what really keeps me curious... Because it's really no end to how you can see touch playing a role, and the way it can be used for pain management, it could be u... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, so that's only step one. We only got to the first stop for the train. \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, let's go to the next stop. |
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