Newswise — Even before we are born and begin experiencing the sensations of daily life — a soft shirt on our arms, for example, or a hard tabletop under our fingertips — humans begin to form the senses needed to survive. One of our most important senses is touch, which is the first to develop — starting only eight weeks into pregnancy — and allows us to detect and process tactile information from inside and outside the body. Touch is so integral to our lives that it’s hard to imagine existing without it, in part because when touch works as it should, it fades into the background, providing a steady stream of crucial information without requiring our constant attention.
“Most people don’t think about touch very much until there's something wrong with it,” said April Levin , a Harvard Medical School assistant professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital. “It’s something we take for granted because we can’t shut it off, so we don’t know what it’s like to not have it.” Research on touch has lagged behind work on other sensory systems such as vision and hearing.
Yet thanks to new research tools and greater scientific appreciation, “I think we are now in a touch renaissance,” said Lauren Orefice , an assistant professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. “It is an incredible time to be a sensory neuroscientist studying touch.” HMS researchers have been leading the way, simultaneously studying the basic biology of touch, an.
