Phil Stieg
Reach out and touch someone isn’t just a slogan from a long distance phone ad. It’s also a powerful statement about human connection.
Our guest, Dr. Michael Banissy, is a leading expert in the science of social connection. As a professor of social neuroscience at the University of Bristol, his work explores how we understand and respond to others, particularly through touch, empathy, and emotional communication. In his recent book, “When We Touch”, Dr. Banissy offers insights that are timely in a world where our social bonds are increasingly shaped by screens.
Today, we’ll talk with him about the science behind everyday gestures like handshakes, hugs, and high fives, and learn how these simple acts of touch can have a powerful impact on our well-being.
Michael, thanks for being with us today.
Michael Banissy
Thanks for having me.
Phil Stieg
Touch is something I think we all know, and it’s really individual-specific. How did you get into this as a science?
Michael Banissy
For me, my lab, our interest is very much around how do we form and maintain social relationships and how those relationships can really be important for our health and our well-being. Touch is such a fundamental sense. It’s one of the first senses that develops. It’s one of the last that goes. It’s so vital to how we form and maintain bonds.
On a personal side, my father is Persian, my mother is British, and growing up seeing those two slightly different cultures, the slightly different tactile behaviors.
Phil Stieg
Slightly different? (laugh)
Michael Banissy
Yeah, exactly. I had an interest from a social psychology side, as well as from my background in more social neuroscience and that health psychology side of things as well.
Phil Stieg
Is there relevance in terms of the different types of touch and its importance in your life?
Michael Banissy
There’s lots of different types of touch. You’ve got discriminative touch, so that’s your ability to detect heat, pressure, so forth. And of course, that’s really important in certain settings. If you’re sitting by a fire or ramming something hot, suddenly, that’s the most important thing in the world. But then you’ve also got social touch, and that might be a handshake or a pat on the back. And again, that handshake, you might not think it’s that important, but if that handshake has an impact on your likelihood to get a job, which a number of studies have shown that people the firmness and the quality of someone’s handshake before a job interview predicted job interview success. That handshake is probably one of the most important touches in your life.
Then there’s also affective touch – these slow, gentle strokes or even other things like someone giving you a hug, like that supportive touch as well. And these have impacts on your health and well-being. And again, I guess, depending on context, you could argue those are key. I think it’s really hard to say this is the most important one, but there’s all these different ones that play a role in different settings.
Phil Stieg
I really want people to understand the complexity of all this. There isn’t one touch receptor. You go into this a little bit. There’s all different nerves that go to different parts of the brain, and that affects your perception, correct?
Michael Banissy
Absolutely. I’ve mentioned some for slow, gentle stroke, and we refer to that often as effective touch. But then you’ve also got ones that will respond specifically to vibration, temperature, flutter, pressure, all these different dynamics of touch. And it wasn’t really until the 1990s that we started becoming aware of these receptors that were involved in slow, gentle stroking.
So touch is complicated. There’s all these different types of it, and they all can play out and sometimes interact, right? You could have a slow, gentle stroke and a vibration. You can have different dynamics to it. So it’s far from straightforward.
Phil Stieg
Do we understand how the brain perceives a welcome touch versus an unwelcome touch?
Michael Banissy
So welcome versus unwelcomed, I would say I’m not familiar of any specific studies that have done that comparison.
We do know, though, that if you look at pleasant touch, so what people find pleasant versus, let’s say, unpleasant, – which is a subtly different labeling. That kind of pleasant touch – so typically what will happen there is you will see activation of your somatosensory system, so your primary sensory regions that plays a role in processing touch. It’s almost like those first relay stations for it, as it were.
But you also see activation in other areas such as the posterior insula, which is involved in several different functions, one of which is obviously connected to emotional regulation, which may well then be connected to some of those social support elements that come from touch. And you also see activation in some of the more reward systems of the brain. So you see those classic things that you might see if someone’s experiencing eating, so food or sex or so forth. But the reality is that there’s no one specific type of touch, I would say, that we could say is universally positive.
Often, when we’re talking about positive touch, what we’re really talking about is a touch that an individual finds supportive. That, for me, might be a hug. That, for you, might be someone stroking your arm. That, for somebody else, could be very different. Those two things could be really aversive. P rior histories will impact as well.
Phil Stieg
But it would seem me that that is so dependent upon the environment that you grew up in, right? It’s not innate, but more environmental, developmental, and maybe I’m sure some genetic component.
Michael Banissy
Yeah. All these factors will play a role. And I don’t think it’s just about the environment that you grow up in. I think it’s about the environment that you are in now, right? I think your preferences for touch and your different things. Again, you could be a hugger. You could be someone who loves hugs and does all of that. But for some reason in public, That’s a big no for you. There’s a dynamic in that.
Actually what we found in our data is, yes, there are some across cultures, but the bigger waiting is often with those more psychological traits, those things like attachment dimensions, those personality dimensions. Those tend to be the bigger factors in defining people’s preferences and the impacts of touch.
Phil Stieg
It seems to me to summarize it, which I found reassuring, is that people that like touch and have positive experiences with touch are typically more outgoing, less reserved, and they like human contact.
Michael Banissy
Yeah, in fairness, there are those elements to it. Yeah, absolutely. But what also is in it as well is that, for instance, those people who are avoidant, those who maybe have, let’s say, avoidant attachment dimensions, they’re higher in those. They still do get benefits from touch for their well-being.
Phil Stieg
Tell me a little bit about the impact that touch has on our overall health. You’ve written things on touch and sleep, touch and anxiety. Tell me.
Michael Banissy
Yeah, well, I mean, this is the thing that I guess I find surprising about touch, is how important it is for our health and our well-being, actually.
You might enjoy a hug, it might feel good, but you don’t often stop and think about, well, how’s it impacting me physically in my body? And there’s a lot of evidence now pointing to the fact that supportive touch can have a number of benefits for both psychological health and also your physical health.
So to give you one example, there was a study that was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon. And basically what they did was they tracked people over a 14 day period, and they just asked them over 14 days to report how often they were having hugs, how often per day. Then what they did was they brought a subset of these people into the lab and they gave them a virus, and they quarantined them, and they watched how did the virus develop from then on. And what they found was in the data was that people who had had more hugs over the 14 days prior were less likely to develop the virus symptoms.
So there’s something there has this impact on physiology. And the exact mechanisms behind that are things that I think science is still now trying to unpack but the perceived social support from touch doesn’t explain all of the relationship.
There is something about touch, and this, I think, might come back to the fact that, as we said, we do have receptors that respond specifically to certain types of touch and that do modulate some of those brain systems and wider networks that are involved in calming and regulation. So that could be a factor that’s playing a role.
Phil Stieg
We need to improve our touch communication. Is that overall going to be a good thing for the public?
Michael Banissy
Well, I think being comfortable to have those conversations is a good thing, actually, because I think often touch can be a taboo subject. Y–ou’ve got to really think about some of those different dynamics because take yourself. I think if you were to go home and hug your wife, probably that might feel totally natural, totally great. But if you suddenly hug one of your patients, there’s a very different dynamic and setting there. The environment plays a role. The meaning of that hug takes on a different dimension. There’s a lot of complexity around what it means in that sense.
But I think actually having those conversations about, well, where is it appropriate? Where is it helpful? Is an important starting point. And also what do people want? Because this comes back to what is your preference? What is my preference? What is someone else’s preference? Do those preferences change over time? I think about that often in romantic partnerships, right? You might be with your partner for a long time. Lots can change. And actually having those open conversations can help you bring that supportive touch into that relationship.
Phil Stieg
Well, that’s why I was looking for a simple way to address this with patients. And it isn’t simple. Other than asking people to talk about it and then in that conversation, and you get into that when you talk about love and intimacy and how to talk about about affection and touching. That’s not an easy topic. So what are your suggestions about how we get people to reduce the barrier?
Michael Banissy
Yeah, I think it is not an easy topic, but I think we have to make a start by trying to normalize talking about it. I think conversations like this are good points as well, because maybe it goes off for Spark’s ideas and others to work it through. There are interesting things that I think you do also see happening in a range of actually school settings now, where kids are going in, and there’s examples in classrooms where they can choose to high five, they can choose to hug, they can choose to not touch. They’re starting from an early stage about modeling this idea around you own your choices around your bodily consent. Nobody else sets that up .
There are things that we might be able to draw across from some of those things. Maybe there’s a signal of, Okay, I’m open to a high five. I’m open to a fist bump. You could think about some of those things.
One thing that’s interesting, and I have to admit, I’ve not experienced it myself, but in writing the book, I also spoke to a few people who’ve gone to these things called cuddle parties. These are parties where people get together and they hug and they cuddle. So many of them anecdotally report how it really opened their awareness and improved their awareness of consent.
You might imagine, well, these are really open things where lots of people are cuddling and so forth, but there’s so much in there about consent and boundaries and so forth. They were like, actually, I thought about it in a different way. Obviously, I knew consent was important, but going to these parties and really unpacking that. Sometimes there’s an element of those types of experiences may also open people’s perceptions up as well. I’m not suggesting everybody goes to a cuddle party, of course.
Phil Stieg
But on the flip side of it, the other extreme is touch deprivation. And you talk about 10 ways to try to overcome that. Can you list the top three to five for us that you think are most important if you sense deprivation in your life?
Michael Banissy
Well, I think one that, to be fair, I think has moved up my list is self-touch, actually, because I think it can be very hard in the first instance if you’re someone who’s isolated, for instance, and you don’t have those connections to go out and find that, or if you’re particularly anxious to go out and join social groups and so forth, which is something I will talk about. But one of the ones is actually there is now a lot of evidence coming out showing that self-touch can be beneficial to your health and your well-being. So giving yourself a supportive hug or a supportive stroke on the arm, whatever that looks like. I think those can be ways to just very naturally bring touch into your life. Also, even sometimes spotting some of those little details, even now, I’m sitting here talking to you. I’m talking a lot about self-touch, but there’s also I’m sitting and my feet are pressing onto the floor and there’s all these different bodily elements. Focusing on those elements of tactile feedback that I’m getting is actually also somewhat meditative as well. I’m somewhat focusing on presence, which can also be beneficial. That’s one element.
But more broadly, there are things like these social groups that you can join. I’m not necessarily there talking about cuddle parties, but I’m also thinking about even something like community gardening or something like that is an example of a group whereby there you’re going to get social connection for interacting with others, but also going back to that idea of touch, and by using your own touch to ground you and connect, you’re going to be touching the plants, the Earth, you’ll be connecting and bringing it that way. You might, in those settings, start to high five or shake someone’s hand or whatever.
But also just, I guess, if you do have people in your life, just being able to widen that conversation out a bit. Say, Hey, I heard this guy on this podcast talking about the importance of touch. Maybe I can be a vehicle to open the conversation. There’s different dynamics in that way, too.
Interstitial Theme music
Narrator
Intertwined with our sense of touch is our ability to feel pain. As much as we dislike the experience of pain, it’s not a good idea to completely avoid it. Just ask the people who actually don’t – and can’t, feel pain at all.
A rare genetic mutation can cause a condition called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain or CIP. People with CIP have an otherwise normal sense of touch – they can sense things like warm, cool and pressure on their skin – but they appear insensitive to nearly all forms of pain. Jo Cameron, a woman in Scotland who was discovered to have CIP, described giving birth to her children as feeling like “a tickle”.
While you may think being impervious to pain is a super-power, CIP is actually a very dangerous condition.
Pain is the body’s way of protecting itself from injury. One of the reasons scientists believe CIP is so rare is because so few individuals with the disorder live to reach adulthood. And those people who survive their childhood accidents must learn to constantly monitor their body for damage.
At 65, Jo Cameron needed to have her hip replaced – not because it had caused her pain, but because she hadn’t noticed anything was wrong until it was severely degenerated.
Another common factor in CIP is the inability to feel fear or anxiety. This too can have dangerous consequences.
Dr. Geoff Woods, a pain researcher at Cambridge University, reports that “Of the CIP patients he’s worked with in the UK, so many of the males have killed themselves by their late 20s by doing ridiculously dangerous things, not restrained by pain.”
Stephan Betz, a participant in a study of CIP in Germany, shares his perspective this way:
Theme music
“People assume that feeling no pain is this incredible thing and it almost makes you superhuman. For people with CIP it’s the exact opposite. We would love to know what pain means and what it feels like to be in pain. Without it, your life is full of challenges.”
Music out
Phil Stieg
I was most fascinated by your conversation on haptics. I was thinking about it as it relates to elderly, infirmed, isolated and they just don’t have the context. And I never heard of the “Tesla Suit”, Metas “Augmented and Virtual Reality”. And I’ve seen them in movies, the little robotic dogs. But you suggest that Those things are all quite positive. Can you go into that a bit?
Michael Banissy
Obviously, we live now in a world where we have an increasing role of robotics, increasing role of AI and various different elements. What’s quite interesting in the context of touch is that it’s been shown, for instance, that if you take what we call them soft robotics or social robots, and this might often be like a little robotic pet that might have texture and breathe and do all sorts of things and respond to touch. It’s been shown that in those care homes, for instance, and also with undergraduate students, actually, getting people to engage in touching and stroking those robots can reduce anxiety, can have positive benefits.
In my lab, we are now doing work with some of these soft robotics. We do a lot of work with these breathing cushions. These are cushions that breathe but respond to touch and so forth. We’re finding those can be really beneficial for stress and anxiety. We’re now looking in the context of sleep. What if people hug these before they go to bed, for instance, hold them?
There’s a lot of data pointing to their benefits. Now, whether we’re having to look at those because we’re spending more time on our screens and so forth, that’s a debate that others might want to pick up who are more specialists in that area than me. But I think there is potential in them, and certainly we are seeing that. But what I would also say is, don’t forget the fact that self-touch can also help. The key is that you feel comfortable, and you find it supportive.
So if you find touching a robot or engaging with this weird, it’s probably not going to work that well. I think human contact is always going to be vital.
Phil Stieg
Thinking about touch and sleep, I was somewhat surprised that the results that you reported were too much touch actually is harmful to your sleep quality. Explain.
Michael Banissy
Yeah. Well, I think this is that thing about it’s not linear, right? I mean, you can get touched out.
I spoke to many people who worked in massage therapy, and they would say, Look, I’m a wonderful tactile person. I love touch, but sometimes at the end of the day, I get home And I don’t want to be touched by anybody because I’ve been touching all day. It’s just enough’s enough. And I think we can all relate to that, even if you don’t engage in a tactile profession.
If you’re in a profession, a caring profession or whatever, where you’re not necessarily being tacked up, but you’re just talking to people all day. And you need that space for you to then be able to decompress, to be able to then be there for others in your own home. So I think there’s a natural element of it’s a social signal. And like most social signals, that can get tiring. And that in itself, you might think, well, if it makes you tired, it might help you sleep. But if it gets too much, it might also have a negative impact.
Phil Stieg
It also seems to me the inclination is to think that you have a child touching them often is actually a good thing. But now my daughter just had a baby. Everybody wants to hold her. I was thinking, just like you said, you get tired of it. So how does touch affect you as you’re developing a young child? And is there a balance? What’s good? What’s bad?
Michael Banissy
Yeah. I mean, touch is a very important signal throughout development. Some of the clearest evidence of this is actually very straight away, straight after babies are born. If you look at the work with preterm babies, there’s a lot of stuff showing that those that experience touch will typically gain weight faster, sleep better, leave hospital sooner than those who are not touched by human.
Phil Stieg
Can you explain to us what you mean by mirror touch synesthesia and how that may have an impact on our empathy? Yeah.
Michael Banissy
So mirror touch synesthesia. I smile because that’s my baby. That’s where I started. A lot of my science was with this really incredible group of people. They experience tactile sensations on their own body when they see somebody else being touched. And this is fought to be because the fact that when we observe somebody being touched, we tend to recruit the same somatosensory system as when we are physically touched ourselves.
So in essence, when you see someone experiencing that state, you’re recruiting or activating a similar brain region as when you feel it yourself. If you see someone touched on the leg, you activate the leg area. If you see someone touched on the face, you activate the face area. Now, people with mirror touch anesthesia activate this same system, but they over activate it.
They’re interesting in the context of empathy. If you think about empathy as the capacity to share someone else’s experiences, really what you’re talking about here is if you are seeing someone being touched and feeling a state, you are very much almost sharing their experience.
We’ve studied them and worked with these people from the point of view of understanding their empathic reactions. Are they different to non-synesthetes? Well, you find that they have heightened affective empathy. This means they have a tendency, not just with touch, but across the board, to share other people’s states more strongly.
They don’t differ in their cognitive empathy, and this is more about thinking about how somebody else might feel. So you don’t see them, but you’re thinking, I don’t know that person outside right now, how are they feeling? So it’s not empathy in general, it’s certain components of it.
By learning about how they do it and by learning about the mechanisms that drives their empathy, we’re now actually being able to take those findings and apply them in other settings. So we’ve been doing work with often health care professionals, actually. And here what we’ve been interested in saying is, okay, so we know in health care, empathy can be a really positive thing, but we also know it’s one of the largest causes of burnout. It’s one of the largest causes of burnout. Sometimes empathy can be good, but having too much empathy can be overwhelming, problematic.
What we’ve learned from the mirror touch sense is that actually this self-other regulation mechanism, this ability to focus on yourself or away from somebody else, appears to be really important in modulating that Burnout / overwhelm versus experience empathy. And so we’re now been developing training to try to help and work with healthcare professionals and others to look at empathy regulation in the workplace.
Phil Stieg
We touched on this a little bit earlier, but I want to expand on it a bit with the change in society since 2020. People working from home, computer-based. Do you think that the cultural norms for touch are changing in society?
Michael Banissy
Yeah. I think by virtue, cultural norms will always shift. They take time. Sometimes seismic events can force them to shift more quickly. I think around COVID, everyone was saying, Oh, we’re never going to handshake again. We’re never going to do that. I think I was one of the few who said, I think we will, because it stuck around for so long. It’s been since the ancient Greeks, possibly earlier.
One thing that I think the COVID pandemic did do, and again, I have to be mindful that this might be a bias sample of the people that come to our lab and who we talk to. But I think a lot of people say it made them aware of the importance of touch in their lives. And if anything, actually, they were leaning more into looking for that meaningful tactile connections that they were lacking before that. But again, that could be a bias because we – typically, people that want to come and do touch research, they’re not people that dislike touch.
Phil Stieg
You go into it in a book about tactile communication. I agree with you totally. The only way we’re going to get people to change and understand the touch is important is to talk about it.
So what are the key elements in your mind about tactile communication?
Michael Banissy
I think some of the key elements there are obviously preferences, likes, dislikes. There’s obviously wants and desires, which is actually that a “touch hunger” element. So you got to, are people getting what they want in their lives? Is it right in that way? There’s also something around just, to a degree, paying a bit more attention about those impacts of touch. So how is touch actually playing out and having an impact on you day to day?
Even in the workplace, as an example, there’s a lot of stuff talking about how touch can be It’s really important for group dynamics, team cohesion, team performance. There’s a lot of work showing that handshakes before meetings and so forth can lead to more negotiations, more joint decision making, even when it’s combative between people. But I think it’s about, again, raising that awareness of that, picking up on where does it play a role and what are the norms, but also questioning sometimes the norms around touch. Is it actually necessary or not? That’s the other one. A lot A lot of what we’re talking about here is the product. Yeah, touch, touch, touch. But actually, sometimes maybe you don’t need to.
Let’s go back to handshakes. Handshakes are full of germs. There’s a lot of things, a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t want a handshake. And so let’s also say, Well, I don’t think we should go around touching each other all the time. That doesn’t make sense. That also, that’s not the point, right? It’s not quantity. But where are those quality touch points that we might want to think about?
Phil Stieg
You frequently raise the distinction between quantity versus quality of touch and quality being the most important. What quality are you talking about?
Michael Banissy
When I talk about quality, what I’m talking about there is very much in the context of supportive touch. So what for me, it makes me feel supported. What for me makes me feel regulated that I find helpful. That for me, personally, is a hug. But if someone hugged me for a minute, that wouldn’t be a quality touch. That would be quite awkward.
And there’s classic things on the internet of the 20-second hug and all of this. I don’t know where that comes from. There’s no perfect duration for these things. It can be too short, it can be too long, but the sweet spot is for you. It’s that quality. And this is the point about talking about what our preferences are, right? What for you is quality.
And I don’t need to tell that to the entire world. Maybe I just have on this podcast. But I just need to tell it to those one or two people that really matter who I really want that hug from, right? And I think that’s the key.
Phil Stieg
Dr. Michael Banasey, author of “Touch Matters”. Thank you for spending this time with us. It’s been enlightening talking We’re talking about the quantity versus quality of touch, the positive effect of touch, and also the effects of touch deprivation and the role that robots might play in alleviating these problems. But most importantly, I think we have to get society to understand we have to talk about it. Thank you for raising that as an issue, and hopefully, we’ll have more people interested in kind gestures and touch. Thank you so much for being with us.
Michael Banissy
Thanks for having me.
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