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Hermit
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Hugs are important
« on: 2002-07-31 01:26:41 » |
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GOOD TOUCH A Sensual Education
Source: Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
Authors: Judith Levine
Dated: 2002-04
Noticed by: Walpurgis
Highly recommended by: Hermit
Refer also Walpurgis' Superb Review
I confess
I love that
which caresses
me.
--Sappho
Touch is good for children and other living things, and deprivation of touch is not. Baby mice who snuggle with their mothers grow fatter; lambs who are not licked fail to stand up and may soon die. And what Psych 101 student can forget biologist Harry Harlow's doleful infant rhesus monkey, clutching a clown-faced, towel-chested, lightbulb-hearted surrogate mother, and when forced to choose, preferring to cuddle rather than eat?
Human infants who are not held "fail to thrive," and if they survive, they may become social misfits. In 1915, visiting children's hospitals and orphanages, the pediatrician Henry Chapin discovered that the infants under age two, though fed and bathed adequately, were perishing from marasmus, or "wasting away." It took several decades to identify the other minimum daily requirement: touch. Because this was a presumed distaff function, women were dispatched to the institutions to perform the task of "mothering" (holding the infants) and death rates plummeted. Since then, lack of touch in childhood has been implicated in pathologies from ecsema to anorexia.
Loving touch seems to promote not only individual health but social harmony as well. Tiffany Field, the director of the Touch Research Institute at Miami University's medical school, compared children on the playgrounds in Florida with those in Paris and found that adult touch from parents, teachers, and babysitters was correlated with peaceful and cooperative play among the children. The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott made even grander claims. Analyzing information on four hundred preindustrial societies, he concluded that a peaceful society starts with touch. "Those societies which give their infants the greatest amount of physical affection were characterized by low theft, low infant physical pain . . . and negligible or absent killing, mutilation, or torturing of the enemy," whereas those with the lowest amounts of physical affection were characterized by high incidences of the above. Prescott claimed, rather sweepingly, that his findings "directly confirm that the deprivation of body pleasure during infancy is significantly linked to a high rate of crime and violence." This link is biological, he implied: low touch programs the body to a short fuse and a quick punch.
Anthropologists concur that America is an exceedingly "low-touch," high-violence culture. But America's diversity, mobility, and high immigration probably belie any biological relationship between the first characteristic and the second. A more likely interpretation of these facts and Prescott's other findings is social. A culture that lavishes gentle attention on its young also may encourage tolerance of the vulnerable and discourage physical power-mongering. People brought up to be aggressive and suspicious of intrusions against their own body's "boundaries," on the other hand, will be more self-protective and territorial and thus more belligerent, both socially and sexually.
Sociobiology, in particular the kind that compares humans with other beasts, is of even more limited utility when explaining children's sexual development. Harlow's monkeys might have been like us when it came to clinging to Mama, but they also masturbated in public and would have as soon copulated with a partner half their age as with a peer. Behave that way in America and you could get sent to your room without supper, or to jail.
In other words, human touch acquires meaning in a culture, and primary among those meanings is whether or not a given touch, response, or even body part is sexual. Before a Western child has been "civilized," the penis, clitoris, vagina, or anus may be sources of pleasant feelings, like the knees or back, or interesting orifices into which to poke things, like the mouth or ears--not secret or thrilling "sexual" parts. Even claimed evidence of the biological "naturalness" of child sexuality is surreptitiously meaning-laden. Psychologists and sex educators are fond of pulling out ultrasound photos of erect fetal penises to demonstrate that children are sexual before birth. But what they call a prenatal "erection," thus lending it sexual connotation, may be nothing more than a nervous response to the warm amniotic waves inside the uterus. Alfred Kinsey named a certain combination of infantile bucking, straining, and relaxation "orgasm," but he could just as easily have observed a baby's face scrunching in consternation and its body tensing in exertion, then resolving into beatific calm while he discerned a distinct odor emanating from the diaper.
Recent fierce contests over sexuality can be read as disputes over the meanings of touch--more precisely, over whether certain touches between certain people are sexual and, if they are sexual, whether they are "inappropriate" and therefore "harmful." Will intergenerational bathing or nude swimming, or sleeping in a "family bed" when a child is small, harmfully stimulate a child sexually? The scant available data on these practices generally say no: in fact, such relaxed family touch and sight are usually found to be benign or even propitious to later sexual adjustment. Yet, in these conservative times, many popular advice columnists counsel parents against them, just in case.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Hugs are important - Part II
« Reply #1 on: 2002-07-31 01:28:09 » |
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Scientists reveal the secret of cuddles
Source: NewScientist.com news service
Authors: Gaia Vince
Dated: 2002-07-28
Scientists have discovered why being cuddled feels so good - human skin has a special network of nerves that stimulate a pleasurable response to stroking.
The revelation came after doctors realised that a woman with no sense of touch still felt a "pleasant" sensation when her skin was caressed.
Normal touch is transmitted to the brain through a network of fast-conducting nerves, called myelinated fibres, which carry signals at 60 metres per second. But there is a second slow-conducting nerve network of unmyelinated fibres, called C-tactile (CT), the role of which was unknown. The CT network carries signals at just one metre per second.
"It must be used for unconscious aspects of touch because it is so slow," says Håkan Olausson, who led the study at the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden. "It seems the CT network conveys emotions, or a sense of self."
"This study definitely helps our understanding of how touch systems work," says Brian Fiske, assistant editor at Nature Neuroscience. "The researchers were very fortunate to have found a patient who had lost the main touch receptors but still had the slow CT fibres."
Below the nose
Scientists have known for some time that myelinated nerve fibres transmit information about touch, such as its strength and position. But the function of CT fibres was a mystery. This was because it is impossible to distinguish the CT fibre signals from those of the continuously activated fast myelinated fibre.
The patient examined by the Swedish researchers had a disorder that left her with no myelinated touch fibres in her body below the level of her nose. But her CT fibres remained intact.
Olausson stroked the patient's arm and hand with a paintbrush. Although she could not feel touch, tickle or vibration, the patient said she experienced a "pleasant" pressure when her arm was caressed with a paintbrush.
MRI scans of her brain revealed that the stroking activated insular region of the cerebral cortex associated with emotional response.
Hairy skin
The researchers concluded that the CT system may be of important for emotional, hormonal and behavioural responses to tactile stimulation.
"They are the opposite to pain fibres and give the message that the touch is non- harmful," Olausson told New Scientist. "Stimulation of CT fibres is probably linked to the release of pleasure hormones, like oxytocin. Studies have shown that if you stroke infants, their levels of oxytocin increase."
Further research by the Swedish team suggests that CT fibres are only present in hairy skin - the patient showed no response to the palm of her hand being stroked.
Olausson speculates that because the hand is used for so many critical tasks, it needs to be very sensitive to touch and therefore has a greater density of faster- conducting nerves.
Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn896)
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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