NewzYou can talk all you like, but it may go in one ear and out another. Empathy and love are not always spoken in words or in WhatsApps. They are felt, which is why touch leaves such a lasting impression, both consciously and subconsciously.
No amount of texting, video calling or conversation can replace it, research suggests. However, because of overuse of the latter, we are missing out. We may be in touch, but we have lost contact.
And this comes, experts say, at a cost, because we are only starting to realise how important touch is in a world where, well, frankly, it’s going missing in action. It was your first language Long before any of us could string a sentence together, we understood touch and spoke the language of touch and close personal contact. It is how babies first learn they are safe, and that instinct, ingrained since infancy, never really leaves us.
In a 2024 paper published in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness, researchers examining touch in a digitalised world wrote that touch needs no translation and no interpretation. A hand on the shoulder simply says, “I am here.” And that is the kind of universal connection everyone understands. Bodies respond to touch Touch is more than just a physical sensation.
In a paper for the New York-based research foundation the Garrison Institute, emotion scientist Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary cited research showing that holding a partner’s hand slows the brain’s threat response. Is that not incredible to contemplate? Another study found that stressed teenagers who instant messaged their mothers released little to no oxytocin, the bonding hormone, while those who spoke to them or met them in person did receive a hit of the same.
A hug, in other words, does the heavy emotional lifting that a WhatsApp voice note cannot. The forgotten sense of digital life Touch has been called the forgotten sense of the digital world. Yet, after a day of back-to-back messages, phone calls, voice notes and Zoom meetings, many of us feel hollowed out and exhausted.
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