Who’s Touching You Affects How It Feels: Study

June 4th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

MONDAY, June 4 (HealthDay News) — A human touch can feel sensual
or scary or somewhere in between. Now a new study provides insight into
how minds translate a sensation on the legs into a message in the
brain.

A study of 18 straight men suggests the brain reacts differently to the
same touch depending on the context — in this case whether the men
thought it was an attractive woman or a man caressing them.

It appears that “our sense of touch is infused with emotional aspects
even at primary levels, so how we value the touch we receive affects the
brain’s processing of that touch in ways we didn’t suspect before,” said
study co-author Michael Spezio, assistant professor of psychology at
Scripps College in Claremont, Calif.

The researchers launched their study to gain a better understanding of
how the brain processes the emotional aspects of interpersonal touch,
Spezio said. They wanted to know whether it happens in the part of the
brain that primarily handles touch (the primary somatosensory cortex) or
in other areas.

To find out, the researchers scanned the brains of 18 men between 21
and 31 years old with functional MRI as a woman sensually touched their
legs.

In some cases, they thought a man was stroking their legs. In other
cases, they were led to believe it was a woman. Either way, the men were
asked to imagine that the person — male or female — was coming on to
them. To help complete the illusion, the subjects watched synchronized
video clips that strongly suggested the gender of the person caressing
them.

The subjects found the caress from a man less pleasant than that from a
woman. Monitoring of their skin showed that the touches from the men
stimulated them on an emotional level.

The researchers discovered that the primary somatosensory cortex is
less objective than scientists had thought.

“The primary somatosensory cortex is sensitive to the emotional
qualities of being touched in a sensual way by a woman or by a man,”
Spezio said. “We found that seeing the woman or man drove the sensitivity
in the primary somatosensory cortex, since we held the actual physical
properties of the touch — speed, texture, pressure — constant. So the
emotional significance of a sensual caress is processed at a very primary
stage in the brain.”

The study was published June 4 in the journal Proceedings of the
American Academy of Sciences.

Study co-author Christian Keysers, a professor who studies the brain at
University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, put it a different
way, saying the findings make sense “if we embrace the notion that our
brain is not there to objectively represent the world, but to make us
thrive and reproduce.”

Through that perspective, he said, caresses “that are the foreplay of a
sexual encounter are what really matters, not objectivity.”

Paul Zak, a brain researcher and founding director of the Center for
Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California,
said the differences in the brain’s reactions to their perceptions of
touch show that “value is likely being attached to everything we do, and
not only in areas of the brain classically associated with value.”

More information

For more about the brain, check out Harvard Medical School’s Whole
Brain Atlas.