Dr. Giulia Enders

We didn't know that this was there before.

We thought, you know, it just analyzes how much

pressure, how much friction, but no, no, there's also these cells that specifically react towards nice loving touch with a certain velocity.

And actually the velocity when you stroke someone's arm, for example, that they love the most is about one and a half inch per second.

So in German metrics, this would be three centimeters per second.

And this is a velocity of touch and, you know, movement on your skin.

that those cells really get activated and tell your brain, hmm, someone's giving me like a hug or stroking my arm or going through my hair at a speed that is so loving.

And these signals will then calm down our brain.

Yes, and we see that it does that for people, for example, with ADHD or people who are on the autism spectrum.

Those people generally don't necessarily like being touched so much.

But if someone who they trust and feel okay and comfortable with touches them, you can measure and see that it really does them well.

and we can also see this effect on people who have stress for very different reasons not even because they're alone maybe but because they are stressed on an intensive care unit by all the noises and you know examinations that are being performed and then it doesn't help so much when you just

turn off the noise or don't do the examination enough because they're already stressed now.

But what immediately helps is just touch like a nice good massage, massaging the hands or the feet or the back.

This will alleviate the stress immediately and not actually eliminating the source of where the stress came from in the first place.

Well, thank you, Mike, for having me.

I really enjoy talking to you and thank you for having me on.