The Power of Touch
- marketingc8
- 18 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Do you take for granted the information delivered every day via touch?
You couldn’t button a shirt or tie shoelaces without touch. You couldn’t hold an egg gently or grip a pen to write. You couldn’t tell which side of the tape is sticky.
You couldn’t tell if the stove was hot (until your nose smelled burning skin, that is) and you couldn’t sense a sharp edge or a splinter to avoid injury.
How would you tap or scroll your smartphone without? Touchscreens depend on, yes, touch. And, if you take up a new skill (painting, cooking, playing guitar, playing keyboards, knitting, sketching, etc.) think of how your hands start to learn and remember what to do.
What’s remarkable is how quickly we process information from our fingertips. It’s a bit jaw-dropping about the functionality of our skin-level receptors, the sensory transduction channel and the bioelectrical cascade that translates inputs into cellular responses.
Signals travel rapidly from fingertip to brain—roughly 10 to 15 milliseconds for the entire journey. They travel up the spinal cord, route through the brainstem and thalamus relay centers, and terminate in the somatosensory cortex, a band across the top of your brain.
Finally, the brain maps the signal and interprets the intensity, location, and texture of what you are touching. The next time you get a paper cut or the next time you yelp when slicing an onion, take a moment (maybe more than 10 milliseconds) to appreciate how quickly your brain understood the danger and instructed you to stop!
Depending on how much surface area of your finger is coming in contact with surface, the number of nerves firing could range from a few dozen to hundreds. Each square inch of a highly sensitive area (and the fingertip is one of those) contains roughly 17,000 touch receptors.
17 thousand.
One square inch.
All of those receptors might detect the touch, but only the directly stimulated ones send electrical impulses (along with action potentials) to the brain.
Of course we’re big fans of touch here at Anatomy in Clay® Learning System. The mind cannot forget what the hands have learned.™
We know it’s true. You know it’s true.
Hands-on learning grounds abstract concepts in tangible reality. Hands-on learning triggers broader neural activation, builds stronger synaptic pathways, and transforms theoretical knowledge into long-term memories.
Think of all the good things that happen when you interact with physical objects—the motor cortex is stimulated, the visual cortex is stimulated, the somatosensory cortex is stimulated, too.
And that brings us to this 2024 study from Earthwatch: Why Hands-On Science Keeps Students Engaged When Textbooks Don’t. This systemic literature review of over 100 empirical studies found that hands-on science significantly improves students’ academic performance, conceptual understanding, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills—outperforming traditional textbook-based instruction across grade levels.
One hundred empirical studies!
Thank your fingers. Thank those receptors. Get out there and put your hands on some learning, especially if you’re trying to grasp human anatomy.
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