The World of Touch

Cornelia Elbrecht AThR, SATh, SEP, ANZACATA, IEATA, IACAET

Without touch we cannot survive. Babies who are not being held and caressed will at best develop serious mental health issues. While we can live with being deaf or blind or without smell and taste, without intact touch sensors we cannot perceive pain. Just this alone will make life so unsafe that such individuals usually die in their first years of life. (Linden 2015)

Neuroscientist Laura Crucianelli describes touch as a “kind of language – one we learn, like spoken language, through social interactions with our loved ones, from the earliest stages of life.” (L. Crucianelli March 2021) Tactile gestures are social communicators to build social bonds and establish power relationships. A firm handshake communicates competence and confidence and has been confirmed as a key indicator of success in a job interview. Sports teams that often hug win more. Waiters who only briefly touch the shoulder of their patrons receive more tips; and doctors who physically touch their patients receive higher ratings. (Linden 2015) The language of digital communication is saturated with touch metaphors. We ‘keep in touch’ and acknowledge that we are ‘touched’ by someone’s kindness.

Many neuroscientists and psychologists believe that we have a system dedicated exclusively to perceiving social and affective touch, distinct from the one which comes into play when we touch objects. Nurses and caregivers apply instrumental touch, necessary for medical treatment, bathing, dressing and assisting patients. Affective touch, defined as expressive touch is for example performed by massage therapists. Slow, caressing touch even by a stranger was understood in experiments as ‘loving’, while a brief touch was more transactional.

The #MeToo movement exposed touch as a weapon men use to impose power over women. But just as often women have used touching men erotically as a currency to manipulate them for gaining access to certain opportunities.

Touching the skin reduces stress factors such as heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels, in adults and children. It prompts the release of oxytocin, the ‘love-hormone’ which calms, relaxes and induces a feeling of being at one with the world. Every time we hug a friend or stroke a pet this hormone is released into our body, producing a feeling of wellbeing.

Neuroscientist Laura Crucianelli researched oxytocin as the “glue of the senses”. The results showed that oxytocin was instrumental in multisensory integration, which in turn, is at the root of our sense of body ownership. This is something most people take for granted, but without touch, and without the biochemical reaction it ensues, we do not come into being. “Through deteriorating social relationships, we also detach from ourselves.” (L. Crucianelli 2021) Anxiety for example is closely linked to the lack of touch according to her findings.

A new study at Yale School of Medicine recently discovered that stimuli from multiple senses share the same subcortical arousal networks. Lead researcher Aya Kalaf explains that “we were expecting to find activity on shared networks, but when we saw all the senses light up the same central brain regions while a test subject was focusing, it was really astonishing.” (Guzman 2025) Stimulating four senses: vision, audition, taste and touch, they discovered that sensory input shares subcortical systems in the midbrain and thalamus. More importantly, the discovery highlights “how key these central brain regions are in regulating not only disorders of consciousness, but also conditions that impact attention and focus, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”.

While these insights at Yale will likely lead to more efficient drugs to treat disorders such as ADHD, I have witnessed in hundreds of therapy sessions the multisensory therapeutic benefits of touch experiences like Clay Field Therapy on these subcortical areas that regulate “awareness and consciousness”.

Art materials, but especially clay and fingerpaints have a unique ability to mirror every imprint. They feedback touch: as I touch it, it touches me; as I affect it, it affects me. The hands continuously reverse their positions as subject-touching and object-touched (Patterson 2007)(p. 161). I know that the multisensory integration of such sensorimotor experiences creates body ownership. I have observed this in almost every session, and clients confirm this wonderous sense of arriving in their body. Saba Basoglou’s research confirmed what her clients called: embodied reflection and how Clay Field Therapy “creates a new sense of being”. (Basoglou Yavuz 2025)

Sensorimotor Art Therapy focuses on supporting rhythmic movement, strengthening embodiment through engaging clients’ gravitational core, and their haptic connection with the art materials. It is an approach that enables them to tap into their earliest developmental building blocks in the midbrain and brainstem, just like the Yale study suggests. These are implicit discoveries where clients are encouraged to post-nurture and re-experience themselves through an embodied touch connection with the world at hand. (Elbrecht 2021) In the safety of the therapeutic environment, they can create new implicit memories through their haptic sense. And such sensorimotor achievements are lasting, just like for preverbal infants and toddlers; they are remembered like having learnt to walk or ride a bike.