07 May 2020
Have we taken leave of our senses?
By Richard Pooley
Like at least one other contributor to Shaw Sheet, I am experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic outside my own country. In my case I’m a Brit confiné in south-west France. So, since arriving here a few days before the French lock-down, I have been trying to get a sense of what is going on by reading, listening and watching the media both in France and the UK.
On Saturday 2 May I listened to the PM programme on BBC Radio 4. I was delighted to hear one British medical expert, Alison Pollock, Professor of Public Health at Newcastle University, give her opinion on how the British government was handling the crisis. Delighted because she was making it clear that she and other distinguished scientists, named by her, profoundly disagreed with what is being done by ministers and officials in the name of “Science”. Her interviewer, clock-watching, kept talking over her and made no attempt to explore any of the points Professor Pollock was making. Does the BBC see its job now to simply be the mouthpiece of the British Government, promulgating government policy and not allowing critics of it to be heard? It certainly seems like it. I am not alone. Commentators as different in their world view as Peter Hitchens and Alistair Campbell are asking why the BBC and most mainstream British media are not asking hard questions of ministers. Not so in France, where media of all kinds and political leanings are fuelling a national debate as to what should be done now and in the future. You may feel that pliant, ill-informed Brits are more likely to obey government instructions once the lockdown is gradually lifted than the less docile, better-informed French will be when déconfinement starts in France on Monday. Maybe initially. But when the British come to realise just how much their lives, their society and their health have been changed for the worse by the decisions of their masters, will their response be to blame themselves for their acquiescence? Trust in the ruling elite has always appeared to me to be higher in the UK than in France. I wonder if it will remain so once the British emerge from this pandemic and face its economic and social consequences.
But it was something Professor Pollock said which I want to focus on now. She pointed out that living alone, unable to have visitors, was an “enormous hardship for older people, who may not have much longer to live.” She argued that they should be allowed to have a visit from at least one member of their family, as is beginning to happen in New Zealand. She went on: “Solitary confinement, which is like prison, is inhumane and barbaric. We’ve never had anything like this before in this country. It’s quite barbaric.”
I agree. What’s more, the long-term damage to people’s physical and mental health may far outweigh the supposed benefits of such isolation. Perhaps more people will die from the effects of solitary confinement than from Covid-19. We have known for a long time how lethal loneliness can be and many experts have been reminding us of this fact from the start of the lock-downs in different countries. But I have yet to see or hear anyone anywhere mention the deep damage caused by what medical experts call “touch starvation” or, more colloquially, “skin hunger”.
Millions, perhaps tens of millions, of people around the world have been cooped up in their homes on their own without even a pet for company. For weeks if not months they have been unable to touch another living creature. I’m one of them. I last touched someone eight weeks ago, when I hugged my wife goodbye as I left home in the UK to fly to France. Even when I met French friends for lunch three days before the official start of France’s confinement, we eschewed the usual hugs, kisses and handshakes. This must surely be the first time in human history that so many people have not been able to touch another human being for months on end.
If the same number of people on their own suddenly lost their sight or their hearing we would certainly be talking about it. We have heard how some people with Covid-19 lose their sense of smell and taste. But few seem to be thinking about what happens when people lose their ability to touch another person. Is that because none of us isolates have actually lost the sense of touch? Or is it because touch is the forgotten sense? It certainly seems to be the least researched.
David J Linden is a professor of Neuroscience at John Hopkins University School of Medicine who has written a book entitled Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind. He makes it clear that the sense of touch is vital to our health from the day we are born. If a baby does not get regular contact with another human’s skin “all kinds of terrible things happen, and not just cognitive and emotional. Your immune system doesn’t develop properly, your digestive system tends to have a problem – there’s a whole rack of health problems that can develop if you don’t receive touch in early life.”
Skin to skin contact releases oxytocin, sometimes known as the “cuddle” or “feel good” hormone. Such labels belittle its importance. Its release sends a message: ‘you can trust me’. Studies have shown that even the briefest of touches from a waitress to a customer will yield her bigger tips, and that a light touch of a stranger by someone seeking help will make such help more forthcoming.
As someone who has studied, practised and written about negotiation across borders, I know first-hand how important touch is in building trust between strangers and reinforcing it between partners (something we shall need to overcome in a post-Covid-19 world when so much negotiation will have to be done online).
The gelada baboons of Ethiopia are reckoned to spend 17% of their waking hours grooming each other. They do it so that they can pick out parasites but also to bond with other clan members and ease tensions within the group. Humans are apes too. Skin hunger deprives us of that assurance that we matter to others, that we can be trusted. It causes depression, lack of sleep and loss of confidence.
One study of basketball teams in the USA showed the benefits of bonding through touch. The more on-court touching teammates did with each other early in the season, the more successful teams were by the end of the season. The effect of touch was independent of salary or individual skill levels.
Levels of dopamine and serotonin, neurotransmitters that help our body cope with anxiety and stress, are raised when we touch each other. Touch continues to improve the function of your immune system long after you have ceased to be a baby. One study of women found that getting more hugs from their partners lowered their heart rates and blood pressure (though surely this depends on the strength and purpose of the hugs).
We communicate far more through touch than we realise. A study in 2009 showed that even scientists were unaware of its importance. US psychologist Matthew Hertenstein asked American volunteers to communicate eight emotions – anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, sympathy, happiness and sadness – to blindfolded strangers solely through touch. Hertenstein expected the recipients of these touches would guess the emotion correctly 25% of the time. He was wrong. The accuracy rate was sometimes as high as 78%. Similar results were found in similar studies in the UK, Spain, Turkey and Pakistan.
We have all been told during the pandemic of how important it is not to touch our faces with our hands, and that the value of wearing masks is reduced if we fiddle with them. All well and good, but has anyone making such recommendations considered why we, even in normal times, touch our faces, massage our foreheads, push back our hair, tweak our ear lobes or rub the back of our neck hundreds to times a day? They are calming mechanisms. Self-caressing has been shown to slow the heart rate and lower the level of the stress hormone, cortisol. And guess what? If you are denied skin-to-skin contact with another person, you compensate by massively ramping up (the phrasal verb de nos jours) such face-touching. Ask my wife, who nags me about it on our daily FaceTime call.
Someone who studies nonverbal and emotional communication is Laura Guerrero of Arizona State University. She says that “research shows that touch is the best way to comfort.” In times of intense grief or fear only by touching can we truly express what we feel. What times and in what condition are we forcing millions of mostly elderly people to live through now? Self-confinement is indeed barbaric and probably counter-productive.
A final message to my friends and family with whom I have regular calls on Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp and Skype: please stop signing off with “Stay in touch!”
