Understanding the Seven Senses of Touch

Paying attention to the varied and nuanced senses of touch in the body enhances understanding and connection to its lived experience.

### Exploring the Multifaceted Sense of Touch
* 🖐 The traditional view of touch as a single sense is challenged by the recognition of **multiple distinct touch modalities**, including tactile, pressure, temperature, proprioception, nociception, and vestibular senses.
* 🧠 The **proprioceptive sense** allows us to know where our body is positioned in space without relying on sight, crucial for activities like **walking and clapping with closed eyes**.
* 👃 Nociception, often associated with pain, is a specialized sense that evolved to detect damage, such as burning or tearing, and is **distinct from temperature perception**.
* 🤔 The speaker highlights the complexity of the body's internal touch sense, enteroception, which informs us about the **condition of our internal organs** and can be linked to sensations like **stomach aches** or the **urge to use the bathroom**.
* 🌟 By paying close attention to these various touch modalities, the speaker aims to **deepen their somatic experience** and **explore the nuances of bodily sensations** beyond the traditional understanding of touch.
* 💬 They reflect on the implications of this exploration for personal growth and communication, noting how being in touch with **internal sensations** can enhance **vulnerability and authenticity** in relationships.
* 🎓 This somatic inquiry is part of a broader process of embodying "**wise knowing**," integrating mind and body to develop a more **grounded and holistic understanding** of self and reality.
* 🌱 The speaker expresses excitement about the potential of this integrated approach to inform their teaching and theoretical work, envisioning a **more powerful and authentic connection to truth** and a **deeper impact on the world**.

waiting pretty good shift yeah okay let me get sold why it does that all right cool the last several videos it will show some seemingly random number of minutes on the live thing but i've come to recognize oh i think it's you may start counting when i boot up the live stream screen whether i hit uh submit or not if i had begun the live video or not hmm so day 86 of 100 days of visibility i actually don't feel very presenty today there are a lot of things on my mind a lot of ideas i can share and there's also kind of a disinterest in being as disembodied as i would need to in order to dive into them a lot of what i'm alive to right now i'm continuing this trend of being really attentive to the details of the sensations of my body there's um now there's a map that i think is is helpful to know about i'll go ahead and share that here it's a recognition that there when we talk about the sense of

touch we actually mean a whole lot of different senses. We blur them together in part, I think, as an expression of how um, I think, how out of touch we are with what the sense of touch even is. It's helpful to notice because when we start zooming in on that and we notice how they integrate, it highlights something about um, how like what is touch actually like. I think of the icons of the of the five senses and you have the the eye for sight, the ear for sound, the nose for smell, the tongue for taste, and the hand for touch. That makes sense because that's what you touch with but um, but which organ is actually your touch organ. It's not your hand like you can feel with your elbow, you can feel your face, is it your skin, uh, but um, I mean probably the the easiest example to well, well, I mean you can even feel food in your mouth and say it's like this is not skin on the inside or maybe it is a kind of skin but it's not really um, you can feel sex

um that's like particularly as if for women uh vaginal sex is not about skin on the inside it's so but that's definitely a sense of touch. What about when you have a belly ache? That's not about the skin. So the skin is a medium but it's not what it touches. About the same way that if you were to plug the ears sound vanishes. If you pluck out the eyes sight vanishes. It's not the same thing. It's not clear what you would remove in order to remove touch. You have to do something like remove the head. Um so there's um I don't have the list enumerated off the top of my head but I'll just highlight some of the different senses of touch that we have. There is the tactile sense. This is the one that lets us know that when touching metal versus a cat's fur versus carpet that um numbers is sand like that each of them have a different texture to them. They have a different tactile feeling to them. That's one sense of touch.

another is pressure like just the like the sense of like how much pressure do i feel in the room. How much um when i'm pushing on something. How much force can i feel. So the sense of overall net force pressure um it's how we tell how heavy an object is. We feel it with the sense of oh okay this is about yeah heavy and it's from the sense of the version of the sense of touch that's about pressure. There's also a temperature which at least for me i think this is pretty common but at least for me is conflated with a part of texture. There's some overlap between temperature and texture which is why uh it can be confusing whether when touching something cold whether it's wet. I notice that there's some sort of uh flip that happens in my experience. So there are three senses of touch that are fairly separable like feeling the baking heat of the sun is very different from if you actually felt the sun's rays pressing down on you and you had to push against them.

um, which is different still from like what would it be like to touch the light, right? There's so there are already three senses of touch. There's another sense of touch, proprioception, which is the ability to know where how your body is positioned in space without using other cues like sight. So it's what lets me like clap my hands behind my head. I can't do it by coordinating. I mean, I guess I have a little image here, but I don't have to use it. I can do it with my eyes closed, and my ability to do that, it's varying, right? Because it's like close your eyes and try to bring your fingers together. It's a little harder than if I'm using my vision, and I can correct with my sight. So there's crossover between all the senses. They all work together, but the ability to tell how the body is distributed through space, and that's a really basic one, that's a version of the sense of touch. It's part of somatic intelligence. It's part of what's involved in being an athlete.

you really need to track that, but you also need it for things like walking. You have to be able to feel where your feet are and have that feedback loop happen. Otherwise, you can't tell, do I put my foot forward or not? Is my foot forward or isn't it? One of the quirky bits about phantom limb syndrome where somebody has to have a limb amputated but they still feel the limb there and the limb hurts. It's phantom limb syndrome. It's surprisingly common. Part of the feedback loop that's happening there is the brain's map of the body hasn't updated, such that there is no longer the limb there. So, that lack of update means that there's still an anticipation that there's a sensory input. There's almost like a proprioceptive projection, but there's no limb to give feedback, so the brain projects pain. Pain is actually not a sense. It's not an input. It's not an input to the brain. It's an output from the

brain it's a label that the brain gives to sensation in order to give it the right kind of charge to activate the rest of the body system. So the pain is there is an error. It's basically an error signal. So the fact that that is possible, the fact that you can have phantom limb situation is coming from the brain's feedback from proprioception, which is this fourth version of touch. Um, there's a fifth version of touch, which is sort of like more like the first three, which is nociception, which is the closest thing we have to pain. I'm a little confused about what the relationship is between nociception and temperature perception, but this is the way in which things can feel sharp or where things can feel. The nociception like you have literal nerves in your throughout your body that are like they're called nociceptors. They're specialized specifically for nociception. You also have proprioceptors that are for proprioception, which is the body distribution through space nociception.

is designed. It evolved to detect damage, so a burning or tearing, or the most common. So, um, this is, uh, so when you get a cut, the kind of sensation you get from the cut, that is, that's not exactly. It's not just a temperature thing. It's not, uh, really tactile. There's something else going on. There's a kind of, there's a problem-ness to it. So, that's the output to the brain that causes it to be labeled as pain, but the input. This is the thing where you can prick your finger, and your body jerks. That's actually not a pain response. It's a nociceptive response. It's just that the brain tends to label nociception as pain. A counterexample for some people is hot spice dick in something like hot peppers, cayenne pepper, or hot Thai food. The burn that you feel in your mouth is, it's not the burn of temperature. It's not drinking a hot drink. It's a different kind of burn, sort of tingly burn.

that's because the chemicals in hot food in spicy hot food stimulate the nociceptors in your mouth. For some people, this can actually be pleasant. Part of the reason it's pleasant is because of the loop that goes between nociception and the body's sense of there being alarm or a problem. And so, there's some tendency to release endorphins as a sensory control gate. So, endorphins can be very pleasant. It's sort of like a runner's high. Runner's high is the body going, Fine, I give up. Here's something pleasant. I need to be able to keep running. So, that's five versions of the sense of touch. And there's a sixth one, which it's like it's arguable whether it's a sense of touch, but if you, it's clearly a sense. And if you're gonna put it with one of the five senses, it clearly should be touch, which is your sense of balance. There's actually a seventh one too. I'll get to that in a moment.

uh the sense of balance is uh this uh vestibulation near vestibular sense mostly in the inner ear. You can notice how interrelated the senses are by trying to like so you try standing on one foot and see how much of the struggle it is. And then once you feel pretty balanced, try closing your eyes. It's amazing how much balance gets its cue from visual correction just like you want to touch your fingers together. Try shaking your hands, closing your eyes, and then trying okay it's a little trickier. And if you can do it right in front of you, do that. Okay, trading it behind you, it gets to be a little bit harder because usually we don't try to touch our fingers together behind us. So, that's the touching the fingers is the correspondence between vision and proprioception. Standing on one foot and closing your eyes highlights the connection that's normally there between vision and vestibulation vision and balance. Basically, when we're in free fall, it's the vestibular sense that tells us that.

we're in free fall, and there's no way to tell the difference from the vestibular sense between free fall and being in zero gravity. So this is something that I sort of have to train the body, like astronauts have to train their bodies to overcome, to become okay with that. Yeah, you're falling, and it'll be okay. You sort of get used to this. It's a vestibular sense that gets rocked around predominantly in a roller coaster. The seventh version, I think I'll stop here for giving a map. I'm trying to highlight how varied this thing is. The seventh one is enteroception, and we actually have a different branch of our nervous system that is responsible for telling us how our internal organs are doing. So when you have a stomach ache or your guts feel weird, the feeling of I've got to go to the bathroom, the pain of appendicitis. Well, pain is like sometimes that's because there's actually um, uh, nociception going on inside. So you have nociceptors inside as well.

um, in fact, I think the only, the only, uh, area of your body where you don't have nociceptors is inside your brain. When you hear this stuff about, Oh, you have no pain nerves in your body, there's no such thing as a pain nerve, but you don't have routed damage detectors in your brain because that real estate is better used for other kinds of neurons. So, it's that's scraped out. You also don't need proprioceptors in your brain. Yeah, you can't tell what part of your brain is working. You just don't have proprioceptors in there because why would you? Proprioceptors, if I remember right, are actually attached to the muscles, so they detect how bent the, uh, the joint is, and then the brain puts together all of the information from the proprioceptors, from the, from the proprioceptive nerves, into a model of the body, hence the phantom limb. So, what is all that for? Well, one thing that it highlights is that if you actually pay attention to the lived experience of the body and what it means to experience it is

actually much more varied than we tend to think. Oh, and I'm using the sense of touch. I'm feeling my body. Well, what do you mean by feeling? Do you mean feeling how warm the body is and feeling its distribution through space? I mean feeling the organs inside your body and how they're doing. What exactly is meant? What exactly do you mean and saying, Oh, I feel my body, paying attention to my body. So, um, a bit of rustle right outside my door. So, I have so most of what I've been doing lately is plugging a lot of awareness, particularly into my interoception, building the other senses. I've been working on the even the other senses of touch. Touch is very special. Even when you just look at any one of these, vestibulation might be a little different, but the rest of them, they're they're all distributed throughout the entire body. The vestibular sense actually occurs from your inner ear, so it actually is very localized, but the rest of them are distributed. The closest thing to a localization any of

them have is that they're in your brain because they're computed. That's true of all of your senses. So touch is enormously distributed and grounded. It's not a very specialized sense. It's highly nuanced. And the interception, the feeling specifically of how do my lungs feel? Can I feel my heartbeat? Some of that's coming from the pressure sense, feeling the pulse in my hands. But this is, I can't quite feel the two distinct. I can't if I actually feel my pulse. But, um, you know, my interception isn't quite good enough to feel all the nuances of my heartbeat yet. Feeling my intestines, feeling my liver, it's a little trickier. To feel my spine, that's mostly through proprioception. It's a different neural route. So just paying attention to these sensations and being with them. By being with, I mean paying attention and keeping attention on them. It looks like the sun is starting to come out. It's going to do some interesting things in the video in a minute. One thing that I started to notice by

like having this map of touch, and then noticing, okay, well, feeling the air on my skin, this is useful for anchoring into going down into sensation instead of up into mind. If I want to specifically zoom in on in detail and get more accuracy about what's going on enteroceptively, by going down, I'm not using the mental math so much, just feeling one thing that started to become a lot more alive to me is something like how wet and soft the inside of the body is, and some sort of image like, oh yeah, there's this pipe of the esophagus goes down into the stomach, the stomach goes into through the duodenum, and into the intestinal tract, and then goes through pipe, pipe, pipe, and up butt, and then all like that's the digestive tract, and then you have a separate system, which is the cardiovascular system, where the heart pumps and blood vessels everywhere, and by some kind of magic, they deliver the blood, but it somehow doesn't bleed everywhere, and whatever is some kind of magic there, but then it loops.

back and pulls the blood cells back into the heart, and um, and somehow this is related to the lungs, but that's one, that's its own system, and there's a nervous system, and it sort of got these images like going through an anatomy book, like these are like their pipes, but the whole thing is so much more wet and soft than there's a that here that i'm feeling very in touch with. There's almost a sweetness to it, um, it's almost like I just feeling inside on the cheek, that's that's the quality of the softness on the tongue. It's a, it's a different texture, it's more active or something, but like it's soft, it's very soft, and there's a softness that's like it's, it's in common with like the inside of the vagina. There's, there's a softness throughout the inside of the body and a wetness, and I logically I understand, oh, of course it is wet tissue, and that's how it keeps that sliding and the hydration is

necessary for its functioning, but there's something about that that brings in this mechanistic view. Part of what I am noticing is like, yeah, sure, I've got, I've got these, these joints that are like hinges on my fingers, and the hinges have a kind of lubrication fluid inside of them. That's part of where the capacity, the pop, is coming from. There is something about the sliding along the way the lubrication fluid moves through the air or something. I'm a little confused about it. I think maybe everybody is. Um, and I can talk about this in terms of, okay, and then down in the forearm. Actually took me a long time to realize, oh, okay, the thing that actually moves the fingers is in the forearms. Um, there's like a cable, okay, as cable runs all the way down into the forearm, and when the muscle tenses, it pulls on the cable, and that's what bends the fingers, okay. So it's a very mechanical process, but there's a way I have to be almost removed from the lived experience of what this is actually doing and what

it's like because that like that metaphor the cable, and some sort of like pull is happening here, and that this is a hinge, and this is the part where just under the skin is this enormous softness, and that that is interwoven with blood, like if there's any cut there will be blood, so it's not just soaked in blood, it's it's interwoven, it's not just a machine, this is alive, so speaking from a place that i don't wanting to convey express something that's been touching me about something of the feeling, the flavor, a subtle energy about what it means, something about how i relate to my own body, what aliveness is, the way in which this tissue feels different from the tissue of a 10 year old, and feels different from the tissue of an 80 year old, it's not just age, there's there's something specific about the quality, the springiness, the vitality, the when i breathe how it tingles, the way it slides, and when i hold my forearm, and i

move my hand around. There's something that slides. You'll be very, very aware of it. I can feel the importance of doing this. This feels like a return to something that I got in Mexico and a deepening of it. In Mexico, it was uh, it was partially chemically derived and the detail of the somatic experience slowly faded over the months. Now it's rebuilding just because I'm choosing to pay attention to it. And it's very grounding. It makes it so much easier to feel the movements of subtle energy, the fluctuations of senses that are more subtle than any of the senses of touch, but is itself a kind of sense of touch. The noticing when I feel a little agitated, noticing when I feel open or when I have a desire. I'm a little scared about having the desire. There's a kind of tenderness, the tenderness, the softness and the wetness and the sensitivity is giving me a very clear somatic anchor for the feeling of vulnerability. It's hard to get more vulnerable than

the tissue that is inside the body feeling that being touched. This is part of why kids put things in their mouths. Like little kids when they're going around sticking all kinds of things in their mouths because the sensation is fascinating and it's more sensitive than the skin. And it's not just hunger. Kids don't go around putting things in their mouth because they're hungry. They do but that's not the only reason. It's more complex than that. So um although funny quirk about me. I never did that apparently my parents never had to fish anything out of my mouth. They did out of my sister but not me. I was satisfied smelling everything go figure that this point comes up about vulnerability because I noticed um earlier today when uh when sharing a desire with my girlfriend. Part of being able to reach a point of honesty and openness about it was noticing the way in which it felt like I was allowing myself to be in touch with the wet tender bits inside my body my literal heart.

my lungs all all of this there's just so much going on in here all the time. It's so subtle and being willing to be in touch with that and then speak from there. I have so much clearer a sense of how little I actually know about what it means to be kind. I'm not completely ignorant that this but most of what I think I know is in the mind, and the mind is going off creating these fantasies that are where it does things like pretend that the stomach is a sack, and the sack squishes, but it's so much more sweet than that, so much more alive than that when I'm paying attention to it. I can actually feel it, so there's a disconnect between how mind thinks about the body and what the lived experience of the body actually is. The longer I spend really feeling what's going on, the um, the more the mind shifts its models, but there's a kind of, oh, oh, oh, this is there's something different here, something different, what is that? I feel a desire to teach.

i'm not going to because i would create a new arc, and i only want one arc per video. Um, i'm going to close this in a moment. What's alive for me as i close this feeling in my heart and in my belly, this tickle, this wish for energy. It's different from how i started. I didn't really want to present before, but there was a kind of, uh, thing that just wanting to. I think i want to withdraw now that i've been speaking for a while. There's kind of, you know, i have a lot to say, not just about these like the this video series being dramatically about me going through my own work and applying this material. This is part of the whole process of embodying, um, embodying the things that last august i was calling wise knowing. I'm really getting into the ground of where the knowing is coming from, being in direct contact with it, starting to feel this little edge of how to show up using the mind really full on. Here's the model, here's the thing.

without abandoning the body and that's exciting. It'll be so much easier as that connection gets stronger because the power of connection to truth will be much more vividly there, and mind will correct, and I'll be able to share a lot more grounded lived theory in ways that um, I'm really excited to see what it does in the world. Yeah, that's it for today. Thanks for watching.

Many senses of touch (Day 86/100)

Michael Smith

The sense of touch is not just one sense, but a combination of different senses including tactile, pressure, and temperature.

These different aspects of touch allow us to perceive texture, determine pressure and force, and sense the temperature of objects.

The experience of touch is much more complex than just the sensation in our skin, involving a variety of different tactile feelings and perceptions.

The Different Aspects of Touch Perception

There are five senses of touch, including proprioception, which helps with body positioning and is essential for activities like sports and walking.

Phantom limb syndrome is a result of the brain's feedback from proprioception, creating a sensation of a limb that is no longer there.

Nociception, the fifth sense of touch, is responsible for detecting damage and is often labeled as pain by the brain, but it is distinct from temperature perception.

The Various Aspects of the Human Sense of Touch

The sensation of touch is not only stimulated by physical contact but can also be triggered by hot or spicy foods, as well as the body's sense of balance.

The sense of touch is closely related to the body's sense of alarm and pleasure, often resulting in the release of endorphins.

Additionally, the sense of balance and the internal sense of organ function, known as enteroception, are also crucial aspects of the complex human sense of touch.

The Significance of Touch and Interoception

Paying attention to the body's internal organs and sensations is a key focus of interoception, a highly nuanced and distributed sense.

Interoception involves feeling the heartbeat, pulse, lungs, and other internal organs, requiring deep attention and focus.

This practice allows for a deeper connection to the wetness and softness of the body's internal tissues, enhancing the understanding of its unique textures and sensations.

The movement of the human body is a mechanical process driven by muscles and cables, but it is also a vividly alive and sensitive experience.

Paying attention to the somatic experience can provide a grounding sense of subtle energy and vulnerability.

The sensitivity and tenderness of the body's internal tissue create a unique somatic anchor for emotions and desires, reflecting the complex sensations of the human body.

The Challenge of Connecting Mind and Body

The speaker reflects on the disconnect between the mind's perception of the body and its actual lived experience, leading to a desire to teach and embody a more grounded approach.

They express a shift in their energy and a wish to withdraw after speaking, highlighting the ongoing process of learning and applying this material in their own life.