Smells and Bells

Touch is often thought of as one of the lower senses, but I think that's because people take it for granted. Unique in its reciprocity, we are touching everything all the time, and it touches us back. While strange to think about at first, we are really experiencing touch every second of our lives. I found it the most interesting that we need touch to live and thrive, and without it, babies can be susceptible to developmental risks or even death. We had touched on this before in psychology classes I've taken- the importance of a nurturing mother's touch for her babies. Harry Harlow's famous experiments on baby monkeys illustrated how integral the sensation of touch was to the babies. Given either a surrogate mother made of wire or a more comfortable one made of cloth, the baby monkeys chose to spend more time with the cloth one, even when the wire one was their source of nourishment. We tend to think of animals (and even humans, sometimes) as only requiring nourishme...