Oooh! Why It Feels So Good to Cuddle
By Cathryn Conroy, Netscape News Editor
From infancy to old age, we all love to cuddle and snuggle. It just feels so good. Now scientists know why! It's long been known that we have two nerve networks that carry the feeling of touch to the brain, but until now we only knew how one of them worked. That one is how normal touch is transmitted to the brain. Someone slaps you. The feeling is sent through a network of fast-conducting nerves that are called myelinated fibers. But there's a second nerve network of unmyelinated fibers that moves very s-l-o-w-l-y. It's also called C-tactile or the CT network for short. Swedish researchers examined a woman with a rare disorder--she does not have the ability to process the sensation of human touch anywhere on her body below her nose--and determined that the CT network is used for unconscious aspects of touch because it's so slow.
"It seems the CT network conveys emotions, or a sense of self," Hakan Olausson of the department of clinical neurophysiology at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Sweden told New Scientist. Even though this woman had no sense of touch, she surprised doctors by reporting a "pleasant sensation" when her arm was caressed with a paintbrush during an experiment. In other words, the CT network still functioned and even though she couldn't FEEL the touch of the brush, she could feel the emotional sensation of it. MRI scans of her brain confirmed the emotional response. Conclusion? The CT system might be important for emotional, hormonal and behavioral responses to tactile stimulation.
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That was an article online, in the newspaper, it said this:
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By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post
... These nerves are sensitive to the soft touch of fingers gliding over a forearm or a parent's soothing hand, but not to rough touches, jabs or pinches.
Scientists speculate that the nerves may be designed to guide humans toward tenderness and nurture, a theory bolstered by the fact that the nerves activate the same brain areas activated by romantic love and sexual arousal.
Scientists had wondered about their purpose, especially because they do not work as efficiently as thicker nerve fibers, which are also found in skin.
The new research, published in the current issure of Nature Neuroscience, indicates that while the thick fibers shoot electrical signals to the somatosensory cortex of the brain near the crown of the head and convey information about contact and pressure, the slow fibers are connected to the insular cortex deep inside the brain and convey the emotional context of the touching.
Both sets of fibers fire togther, and the brain combines information about physical contact with information about emotional context, melding them together into the richness of physical experience.
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Time for nelle to ramble:
And I always thought cuddling was nice because of a mental reaction; thought processes about being near the person to whom you had an emotional attachment, I had no idea that there were actual nerves in your skin that told your brain that this was "good touch." What do you think? What did you think? How did you think cuddling worked? Now I realize that it's not so much what you 'think' about it, it's more how you 'feel' about it. I know that I over-think a lot of things, but I never realized that I was over-thinking cuddling. Not that I really thought about it before, I mean, I just knew that it was nice.
And what about the masochists? The ones who like it rough? The ones who want to be spanked and pinched on slapped and prodded? Is their CT network malfunctioning? Do their soft touch receptors not work as well as others'?
I'm really digging the fact that I can get an emotional high from light touch. And you know, I always listed my sense of touch as like 3rd or 4th important, just because I didn't realize what kind of an impact it had on my mental health. I mean, yeah, I knew it would be dangerous to live without feeling, but if you were careful you could get by, at least, that's what I thought, now I'm not so sure. Maybe it's number one now.
If you had to lose one of your senses, which would it be? I sometimes think it would be taste, because then I would be able to eat the things I currently think taste bad. But then, if I lost taste, I would be more concerned with how things felt in my mouth, and that's the reason I already don't like a lot of foods. I mean, it's not so much how eggs taste, it's more how they feel and smell that I don't like. So maybe I would choose to lose smell. Though, I know that smell has a lot to do with taste, so that would be like losing two senses. Oh, I'm glad that I have all 5 senses. I don't want to lose any.