Feeling with your Fingertips – the Long Read

Humans have lots of skin, with lots of nerves embedded in it.  All those nerves are churning away, second after second, sending millions of impulses to your brain – giving you all sorts of information about the world around you.

When we’re selecting the materials/products that are nerve endings are reading – that new dining room table or countertop, replacement knobs for kitchen drawers, the travel case for our laptop that we’ll lift time after time, etc.—we often don’t put much thought into what they will feel like, what signals the nerve endings in our fingertips will pull from them and how the messages gleaned will influence how we think and behave.

But we should.

Our sense of touch, the tactile information that we process, can have just as much effect on how we live our lives, and whether we enjoy what we’re up to, as what we see, hear, smell, and taste.

Touch often seems to be the forgotten sense.  Called to mind only when something is too itchy to experience for even a minute more and not otherwise.

We all have the same number of nerve endings in the tips of our fingers and if our fingers are bigger those nerve endings are spread out over a larger area, which makes our fingertips less sensitive.  Since men are generally taller than women, all that results in men not generally having as good a sense of touch as women.  So, a chair whose finish seems just right in the home office of a taller person can seem nubby or annoying in the home office of a shorter one, for example.

What have researchers learned about our experiences feeling things with our fingertips?  Plenty:

• Perhaps most dangerously:We start to feel a sense of ownership when we can touch something.  That’s all great, until you find yourself in a store.  Ever wonder why those soft, cuddly sweaters are lined up in all their plump cushy glory right beside the aisle that you have to walk by as you make your way to the section of the store with the boring old socks that you have to buy?  They’re there so you’ll touch them, and once you do that, the odds of you going home without one decrease significantly as long as touching them was a positive experience (they weren’t sticky or itchy, etc.).
• On a more positive note:we’re apt to come up with more creative ways to use something that we have a fundamentally positive response to after we touch it.  It’s as if our brains need to, somehow, connect with the core of what an object is by touching it before they can really understand it’s full range of uses.  So, if you’re wondering how to re-purpose something you’ve inherited or make the best use of a holiday gift, pick it up, turn it in your hands, to inspire yourself.
• We also do a good job remembering textures that we touch, which can be handy if you are trying to make sure you have exactly matched a material that you are using to patch something to the original ones, for example. Similarly, if we touch something with an undesirable texture, we’ll remember it and avoid whatever that is in the future.
• Using a variety of textures, ones that might be found in nature and pleasant, is an important tenet of biophilic design and biophilic design makes us comfortable, mentally and physically.Another important biophilic design principle is using materials that develop a patina, that age gracefully, developing a new and also nice character over time; this aging process can result in changes to textures.
• The order in which we touch one thing influences what we think about the texture of the next things we touch.If we touch something rough, like sandpaper, for example, we’ll likely think something we touch after that as rougher than we would if the first thing we touched was smoother. If you and the people you share a space/object with touch things in different orders, you may have varying assessments of the final surface you touch.
• Softer surfaces, such as flannels, are generally preferred to those that are harder, such as plastics. We also generally have a preference for smoother, as opposed to rougher, textures. Sticky ones don’t get as high a preference rating as even those that are slippery.
• Research specifically with metal surfaces shows that smoother ones (when touched without being seen) lead to more cheerful thoughts and links to comfort, elegance, and modernity, while rougher ones bring up basically the opposite sentiments (discomfort, ugly, for example).
• After touching something smooth or rough we judge social interactions in line with our tactile experiences:if we’ve touched something smooth we will assess a scene as more sociable and relaxed while after touching something rough the same situation is evaluated as competitive, difficult, and tense.  However, people who’ve touched something rougher are more empathetic to strangers and likely to help other people generally than those who’ve touched a smoother surface.  The differences in textures that produce these effects are subtle—having people in studies use a moisturizing or scrub hand wash leads to the different outcomes, so does touching either smooth plastic or sandpaper.
• Textures that are smoother are categorized as more feminine and beautiful and rougher ones as more masculine and ugly, which is handy to know if you want to conform to stereotypes or throw them to the wind.
• Adjectives scientists have linked to feeling smoother textures are pleasant, relief, comfort, bright and quiet while rougher ones have been tied to unpleasant, worsening, discomfort, dim and loud.
• Just after we’ve touched something warm we think of other people as more generous and caringthan after we’ve touched something cold; we’re also more generous ourselves when our hands are warmer as well as more trusting and willing to cooperate with other people, compared to when they’ve touched something cold.  Physical warm and social warmth seem to be linked in our heads; we feel more positive connections to others after touching something warm.  You can use this material by selecting materials/texture that are particularly apt to feel warm/retain heat, or not, as desired.
• When textures are touched, some sort of sound often results (for example, when you pick up a drinking glass made of glass your nails make a different sound as they hit the surface than they do when they contact one made of plastic.Those sounds may seem comforting or annoying or something else entirely; they need to be considered when textures are being chosen.
• We feel air temperatures with our skin.For more information on air temperature-experience links, read this article.   The same goes for ventilation and air movement, discussed in this article.