For centuries we have believed that touch was a sense of “proximity”, useful only for recognizing what we can actually touch. But no: according to a new study conducted by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London, human beings possess a form of remote perception, a sort of “seventh sense” that allows us to sense the presence of objects without coming into direct contact with them.
This ability, known in biology as remote touchwas until now attributed only to some animals such as plovers and sandpipers, coastal birds that manage to locate their prey under the sand by sensing tiny variations in pressure in the ground. But the experiment conducted by British researchers revealed that human hands can also pick up micro-displacements in granular material, just as a wader’s beak would.
The “remote” touch that anticipates contact
During the study, published as part of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning, participants had to gently move their fingers in the sand in search of a small hidden cube. In many cases they managed to locate the object before actually touching it.
The researchers then analyzed the phenomenon with physical models, discovering that our hand is able to perceive microscopic mechanical movements in the sand, generated by the so-called “reflection” effect of the particles against the stable surface of the buried object.
In practice, our fingers can read the waves of movement that propagate in the ground, almost like a miniature biological radar. And if you think this is an isolated case, know that human sensitivity has been shown to be close to the theoretical physical limit of what can be perceived mechanically. Not bad for a sense that until yesterday we thought was limited to the skin.
Humans versus robots: who “hears” better at a distance?
In the second part of the research, scientists compared human performance with that of a robotic arm equipped with a touch sensor, programmed with an LSTM learning algorithm. Well, even if the robot was able to “feel” objects slightly further away, it was wrong more often, with an overall accuracy of 40%, compared to 70.7% for humans. Ergo, people remain more reliable than machines in recognizing invisible contact.
Dr. Elisabetta Versace, psychologist and head of Prepared Minds Lab of Queen Mary University, said:
This discovery changes our idea of the human perceptive field, extending the boundary of what we can feel even beyond the surface of the skin.
Colleague Lorenzo Jamone, an expert in robotics and artificial intelligence at UCL, added:
This synergy between human and robotic experiments opens the way to new tactile perception technologies, capable of improving explorations in environments where sight is not enough: seabed, archaeological excavations or even on Mars.
This research not only rewrites the concept of touch, but also suggests practical applications: from the design of more sensitive prostheses, to advanced robotics and space missions where it is essential to “feel” what cannot be seen. The human “seventh sense”, therefore, is not a spiritual metaphor: it is a real and measurable ability, which has long remained hidden under our fingers.
And perhaps, as happens with waders that search for food under the sand, we too have always had a natural radar within ourselves, we just hadn’t noticed it yet.
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