This is a YouTube video titled "They Physiological Benefits Of Touch" created on January 5, 2020. The content is a monologue or lecture-style explanation discussing the physiological and emotional aspects of human touch, including the role of different nerve fibers and their effects on the body such as heart rate, oxytocin levels, and immune function. The speaker uses examples and scientific findings to illustrate how touch influences emotional and physical health.
We think of touch as, oh, you know, someone touches me on my forearm. Touch is just there to tell me that somebody has touched me on my forearm. No. But it's not true. So there are two types of touch nerve fiber. There's the fast one and there's the slow one, and they do different things. So it's very much like pain. So it's probably easy to understand if we start with pain. So if you, for example, in your kitchen, there's a hot pan on the stove, and if you touch it and it's really hot, instantaneously, your hand will come off it. That's the fast nerve fiber that's told you there's something hot on your hand and you move away. There's no emotional quality to that pain. That is simply telling you what's happened. A few seconds later, the emotional part of that pain comes. You start to feel, you know, really offended. You feel upset that that's just happened to you. Kids, kids are a great example of this. Like when my daughter was four and, if she would fall over, I remember once in the garden, she'd fall over. It would take a minute for her to figure it out that it was a fall. Initially, right, she'd rub her knee because she knew her knee had been touched and she'd be a bit bemused. Three or four seconds later, she started to cry. So it's a delayed response because the slow nerve fiber communicates something different. It communicates the emotional quality of that pain rather than just the geographical location. It's the same with touch. Same thing with touch. He's got this these experiments set up where he's found that actually there's a type of nerve fiber on your skin called the CT afferent nerve fiber. The name doesn't matter so much. What's important about this nerve fiber is that it is optimally stimulated when you stroke it at three to five centimeters a second. Now, when you stroke your wife or your kids, Mark, you don't calculate I'm gonna stroke that now at three to five centimeters per second. No, but when you watch mothers stroke their children, they automatically lock into that speed. Why? Because that C-tactile afferent nerve fiber doesn't tell you where you've been touched. Those nerve fibers go up to the limbic system in your brain and there's an emotional quality. We know that when you stimulate these nerve fibers, it lowers your heart rate. It increases oxytocin. It lowers your blood pressure. It increases the amount of natural killer cells in your body. Natural killer cells are part of your body's innate immune system. They help us to fight off things like viruses and infections. All of these things get influenced by human touch. And we have neglected this.
