We clever evolved technologically advanced humans forget one vital fact: we are mammals, and we still have all our mammalian instincts and drives, albeit overlaid with homo smartarsiensis sophistication. But that's a veneer, and pretending we can ignore our recent past as primates only gets us into strife.
Early on in my year’s training in therapeutic massage, our teacher stated what seemed like an outrageous opinion: ‘If each of us had bodywork every day or even every week, hospitals would soon be out of business.’ He talked about touch deprivation, the lack of simple human contact that means that most of us crave touch, although we probably don’t even realise it. We might call it loneliness – we all know that it’s perfectly possible to be lonely in a crowd, lonely in a marriage. It’s not solitude that gets you, it’s the being out of touch.
Remember the shock of seeing pictures of young children in Romanian orphanages, almost catatonic, standing behind the bars of their cots, faces devoid of emotion. They were starving, not from lack of food, but from lack of human contact. Too many children and not enough staff. No-one with time to play with them, talk to them, hold them. The medical term is marasmus: failure to thrive and dying for no apparent reason.
Britain has been a very disconnected nation since Victorian times, at least; touch is conducted under strict but unwritten rules. In the 1970s a study of 400 human societies found that those who lavished affectionate touch on their children, and were tolerant of teenage sex, were the least violent societies on earth. He also found the converse true.
Touch is the first sense to develop in the human foetus. Frequent pleasurable touch for infants results in positive change in brain tissue, while chronic touch deprivation results in measurable brain damage. Touch-deprived adults may turn to food, alcohol or drugs to make up for the lack of physical contact, or adopt behaviours from promiscuous sex to shop lifting. Touch, or the lack of it, can dramatically affect emotional, mental and physical health. It has huge implications for society, let alone the family and the individual.
The research points to Hippocrates having it right 2,500 years ago. Let’s learn from history, for once, and put more trust in the innate ability of humans to heal with the tools we were born with: head, hands and heart.
