"Touch" Personal Response

Katie Gouch

“Touch” Personal Response

Speaking of Touch and First Touches

                These two chapters seem very closely related to me.  The chapter, “First Touches”, made a lot of sense to me because I was two months premature, and stayed in the hospital in an incubator for almost the whole two months until I was allowed to be brought home.  Nurses and my parents (when permitted) were always touching us.  I don’t know if it was for the scientific purposes like this chapter explores or not, but it was important to my parents to have contact with us.  I remember that my sister and I were so small that my dad could literally hold us both just in the palms of his hands.

                What I wondered after reading these two chapters was: Is there a connection between physical and emotional development when touch is involved?  The chapter made it very clear that when a baby experienced a lot of physical touch, stroking, and comforting, when it was an infant, the child gained more weight, developed its cognitive abilities more rapidly, and was able to sooth itself more in the future.  So, what would happen if a small child was exposed to the metaphysical sense of touch more, as mentioned in the chapter “Speaking of Touch”;  Would the child have increased emotional development and be perhaps more empathetic in life or have better social skills?  If the child was presented with “touching” pictures, stories, videos etc., that evoked emotion, would the child have increased emotional development similar to the physical growth as a response to touch?  I personally think that the child would mature and grow emotionally, but I think that it would be an interesting connection for science to test.

The Skin Has Eyes

                My favorite phrase in this chapter is “A mirror would mean nothing without touch.”  We are visual beings and see the world, but it is our physical knowledge of touch that connects the meanings of the things that we see.  I can look at myself in the mirror and see my nose, but unless I have ever experienced touch I would not know how the contours of my nose relate to the cartilage or bone and how it slopes into the nearby cheek bones.  I can definitely imagine this chapters connection to the project ‘paper stacking’ because we need to look at an object and replicate its contour form in our sculpture, and that is only possible through touching the 3D world.

The Hand

                I thought that it was really interesting that we make the lines in our hands through our experiences.  Now it makes a lot of sense that palm reading exists because the reader is trying to decode the experiences that have made the lines how they are presently.  However, the error in palm reading is that it can only tell the past, because with every movement of our hands we are changing our lines based on our experiences.