Hair twirling... my favorite past time

By Anonymous -

Touch:

https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/hair-twirl

This is how I spend the majority of my day. Touching my hair. I am constantly running my fingers through my hair, or across my scalp, wrapping pieces throughout my fingers, taking strands and swiping them across my face. I love touching those who I have close relationships with hair as well. I have always done this since I was extremely young, my family has joked about it being a genetic thing because both my aunt, and uncle do it. Why do I do it? For some reason this action soothes me. But why does touching my hair bring me satisfaction, and pleasure?
After discussing touch in class I knew I had to do more research on my own, below I will discuss some of the ideas I have found.


David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has written a book Fingertips To Hair Follicles: Why ‘Touch’ Triggers Pleasure and Pain, which touches on my question. Linden says that there are sensors around half of the base of the hair, because they do not make a full circle around the base the feel movement in one way versus another. In class we also learned about the hair as skin extension, the further they extend the subtler the feelings. This is may be why I enjoy touching my hair in different places and at different speeds. Fingertips are also an extremely sensitive part of the body; they have different sensors that pick up on different stimuli. It is the “Merkel ending” that picks up on the feeling of little bumps and groves that create the sensation of a pleasurable feeling.

Therefore in my opinion it is the combination of the hair follicles and the finger tips that create this sensation of pleasure, and soothing when I twirl my hair. Although this explanation does not answer if it is a genetic reason that I find this pleasurable. Since my aunt and uncle also have the inclination to find this pleasurable I would think it may have to do with something in our genetics, but I can not say that for sure yet, definitely something else to ponder upon.



http://nashvillepublicradio.org/post/fingertips-hair-follicles-why-touch-triggers-pleasure-and-pain

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