Something about the sense of touch...

It looks like not our eyes, but the sense of touch that tells us what we are.

This article in New York Times  states that in the dark, we can detect anything that pokes about 1/25000 of an inch up the surface, that is, a bump which could be just a micron tall. It is astonishing that the eye cannot resolve anything smaller than 100 microns.

Surely, the sense of touch is the mother of all sensory systems? Remember how the first single cellular organism on Earth moved around with the help of its feelers? In the child, this is the first sense that comes alive, and in death, this could be the last to go( if evidence of the coma state is anything to go by).

"Touch is so central to what we are, to the feeling of being ourselves, that we almost cannot imagine ourselves without it", in the words of Chris Dijkerman, a neuropsychologist at the Helmholtz Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "It’s not like vision, where you close your eyes and you don’t see anything. You can’t do that with touch. It’s always there."

So timelessly twined with the human experience, yet, the sense of touch is the easiest to fool:

There is something called The Pinocchio Illusion. In experiments where they vibrate the tendon of biceps, many people report feeling that their forearm is getting longer, their hand seems to drift ever further from their elbow. And if they are told to touch with the forefinger of the vibrated arm the tip of their nose, they feel as though their nose gets lengthened, too.

Then there is this finding that involves people who watch a rubber hand being stroked while the same treatment is applied to one of their own hands kept out of view. They soon come to believe that the rubber prosthesis is the real thing, and will wince with pain at the sight of a hammer slamming into it.

There is also the "parchment-skin illusion": Subjects who rubbed their hands together while listening to high-frequency sounds describe their palms as feeling exceptionally dry and papery, as though their hands must be responsible for the rasping noise they heard!

In Eastern Religion, they say, "I am body idea" is the root of all illusions. With some help from these experimenters, our Gurus could easily makes us experience how false this idea is...

But would it make a lasting difference in our lives?