Touching, pressure, and the definition of self
How does the bonding process get encoded into a nervous system? The tactile experience of bonding is one of the primary ways this happens. In the skin, there are specialized receptors that respond to changes upon it: light touch, pressure, pain, vibration, deep pressure, tension, stretch, temperature, pleasure. In his book Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind, neuroscientist David Linden describes how deeply touch and emotions are linked through receptors that are specialized to communicate affect.
The bonding process is a practical proving ground for the newly forming brain. Before seeing colors or learning how to clap her hands, a baby drinks in the feeling of being connected to the caregiver. The experience of connection is a physiological process, not a loosely defined existential concept. This feeling is the root of our psychological understanding of connection. The receptors in the skin, joints, muscles, and ligaments transmit signals to the brain, defining self-identification in terms of spatial real estate. Studies on touch at the Haptic Research Laboratory in Germany indicate that “tactile stimuli go much deeper than visual or auditory stimuli and they are recalled for much longer.”
Being held confirms to the brain that “this is the boundary of my body”, “these are the limits of my volume”, “these are the borders of my being”. As pressure gets tighter from the outside in the form of a hug, the contents of the body put more pressure against the skin from the inside and against these organs. These cavities in the body have more room for variation than those cavities in the body. Being held is literally learning more about what sort of volume one inhabits.
Touch has been shown to increase weight gain in premature babies, decrease levels of stress hormones in the bloodstream, and improve immune function. Touch deprivation makes for a poorly defined sense of self. That is a literal sense of self, of boundaries, of limits. This literal sense forms the basis for the psychological sense of self, boundaries, and limits.
In a series of studies on anorexic women, Dr. Martin Grunwald illustrated how a dysfunctional sense of self can be rectified by directly affecting the receptors in the skin. Dr. Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami in Florida notes that in friendly touch, the Pacinian corpuscles (pressure receptors in the skin) send signals directly to the vagus nerve, thereby stimulating a slowing of the heart and decrease in blood pressure.
Facial expressions and emotional vocabulary
Humans are social creatures, wired for living with others beyond the bonding phase of life. Before language, there is communication through facial expressions. One of the most disabling aspects of being on the autistic spectrum is the inability to measure the social temperature through facial expressions. Discerning emotional cues is something we learn to do by example and is perhaps the single most important guiding principle we possess as social creatures. In his book Building Healthy Minds, Dr. Stanley Greenspan states that emotional processing — far from being regulated by intellectual vigilance — is instead the internal architect, conductor, or organizer of our minds. So emotional processing, not cognitive thinking, drives our psychological profile, which in turn lays the foundation for ease in cognitive processes. I’ll state that again, because as adults we are often of the belief that we should tame our emotions: healthy early developmental emotional processing provides a foundation for ease in cognitive function.
Originally published at coherentbody.com.
