• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Among all your senses, touch is the only one that spans your entire body. The skin — your largest organ — not only protects you from injury and infection but also constantly gathers information about pressure, temperature, vibration, texture, pleasure, pain, and potential threats. 

Unlike vision or hearing, which operate at a distance, touch is immediate and immersive, feeding the brain continuous updates about your body and surroundings. Scientists are increasingly discovering that touch is more than a simple bodily function; it’s a foundation of social connection, emotional regulation, and even memory.

What makes touch especially interesting is how complex and psychologically layered it is. Each sensation engages a network of specialized receptors and neural pathways the brain must interpret — rapidly and often unconsciously. The way those signals are processed reveals just how nuanced this seemingly simple sense really is.

Touch Is the First Sense To Develop

Touch develops remarkably early in human life. By around eight weeks of gestation, a developing fetus can respond to light pressure around the lips, and sensitivity quickly spreads across the body as the nervous system forms. Specialized receptors for pressure, temperature, and movement become active months before birth, creating the foundation for how you later interpret the physical world.

This early sense helps shape the developing brain and is crucial for survival and healthy growth. Touch guides fetal movements, supports neural organization, and after birth, it becomes essential for bonding, emotional stability, and healthy social development long before vision and hearing fully mature.

Gentle Touch Helps Regulate Emotions

One of the most interesting discoveries in touch research is the role of C-tactile afferents, aka nerve fibers tuned specifically to gentle, caressing strokes. Those fibers send signals directly to areas of the brain involved in emotional processing, including the insular cortex. 

When activated, they can reduce stress hormones, lower heart rate, and trigger the release of oxytocin, a hormone associated with bonding and trust. Those physiological responses help explain why a gentle touch from a trusted person can immediately soothe you, soften distress, and create a sense of safety.

The emotional effects of gentle touch are especially profound in early development. Studies on newborns and premature infants show that skin-to-skin contact — sometimes called “kangaroo care” — can regulate breathing, stabilize body temperature, and promote healthier weight gain, all while strengthening parent-infant bonding. 

In adults, similar forms of nurturing touch continue to buffer stress and enhance social connection. Experiments have found that people who receive supportive touch from a partner experience reduced neural responses to threat and even perceive painful stimuli as less intense.

Touch Can Influence Our Decisions

Touch can subtly shape the decisions we make, often without our awareness. Research on embodied cognition shows that physical sensations such as softness, firmness, warmth, or weight can influence how we interpret situations and behave in response. 

For example, holding a warm object can momentarily increase feelings of trust and generosity, while rough textures can make social interactions seem more difficult. Even something as small as an item’s weight can affect judgment: People holding heavier objects have been found to rate issues as more serious or consequential than people holding something light. That effect reveals how the brain uses tactile cues as shortcuts, blending physical sensation with abstract evaluation.

In one 2010 study, participants engaged in a simulated negotiation with a car dealer while seated in a chair that was either soft or hard. Those in soft chairs tended to make higher second-round offers than those in hard chairs, suggesting physical comfort can increase psychological flexibility.

There’s a Reason Your Skin Gets Pruney in Water

When your fingers or toes wrinkle in water, it’s not just soggy skin; it’s a nervous system-driven adaptation to help your sense of touch work better in a slippery environment. While the outermost layer of skin does absorb some water, the distinctive prune-like wrinkling pattern is triggered by your sympathetic nervous system. Blood vessels beneath the skin constrict, changing the tension in the tissue and creating those familiar ridges.

The water-formed wrinkles enhance how you interact with wet surfaces. By channeling water away from the fingertips — much like tire treads — they improve tactile control and surface contact. Pruney fingers are the way your body preserves fine touch and dexterity when the normal friction enabled by dry skin disappears.

Touch Helps Your Brain Know What’s Part of Your Body

Touch is central to how your brain determines what is part of your body. When visual and tactile signals align — such as seeing a hand that’s not yours touched while feeling the same touch — the brain can interpret the touched surface as “you.” Experiments with delayed or mismatched touch show how quickly that system can falter, revealing how actively — and continuously — the brain maintains a sense of bodily ownership.

The classic rubber hand illusion is an example of this. When a visible fake hand is stroked near and at the same time as a hidden real hand, the brain merges the visual and tactile signals. Within minutes, many people begin to feel the rubber hand as their own, demonstrating how touch, vision, and proprioception (the body’s internal sense of movement and position) are woven together to create the feeling of self.

This fluid sense of self becomes especially clear in phantom limb experiences. After an amputation, many people continue to feel sensations — warmth, pressure, pain — in the missing limb. Those sensations arise from the brain’s map of the limb, which remains intact even after the limb is gone.

Techniques such as mirror therapy show how this map can be reshaped. In mirror therapy, a mirror is positioned so the reflection of an intact limb appears where the missing limb would be, creating the visual illusion that the lost limb is still present and moving. 

That visual feedback can help the brain reorganize its internal body model, reducing phantom sensations or pain. The success of such interventions shows that even deeply rooted bodily sensations can shift when the brain receives new sensory information.

Touch Can Create Sensations That Aren’t Really There

Touch doesn’t always reflect the physical world exactly as it is.  When sensory signals clash or are incomplete, the brain fills in the missing information — sometimes incorrectly. In many cases, the nervous system must infer what a sensation means, especially when signals are conflicting or ambiguous, and this guesswork becomes particularly noticeable when it comes to temperature.

The thermal grill illusion, in which alternating warm and cool bars placed against the skin produce a burning or painful sensation. Neither temperature is painful on its own, yet the combination activates overlapping neural pathways that the brain misreads as extreme heat. 

A similar phenomenon happens when you put your very cold hands under warm water — the warmth can briefly feel uncomfortable or even painful. In both cases, the sensation is created by the nervous system’s attempt to reconcile conflicting temperature signals.

Expectation Shapes What You Think You Feel

Touch also relies on prediction. Before you even make contact with an object, your brain estimates how heavy, smooth, sharp, or firm it should be, and those assumptions shape what you expect to feel. 

This is obvious in the size-weight illusion, in which smaller objects feel heavier than larger objects of the same mass — because the brain expects the larger objects to be heavier. When the object is lifted, the mismatch between expectation and sensation creates a strange, persistent perceptual error.

Those constant cycles of prediction, comparison, and correction happen constantly, usually without our awareness. But illusions of temperature and weight prove touch isn’t a simple reflection of physical reality, but a continuous interpretation. The brain draws on assumptions, shortcuts, and memory to construct what you think you feel, and those can occasionally take you by surprise.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Astronauts are members of a very elite club: As of 2025, only around 670 people have been to space, and fewer still have spent a significant amount of time beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Those who have had an extended stay in space tend to be crew members of the International Space Station (ISS), which has housed more than 280 individuals representing 26 countries since it became fully operational in 2009. 

The life of an astronaut is full of adventure, drama, and a certain amount of glamour — but life in space still requires many of the same basic chores we have to handle here on Earth. Of course, without gravity’s assistance, even the most mundane tasks can become complex feats of engineering. Here’s how astronauts aboard the ISS adapt to some familiar chores while traveling at a speed of 5 miles per second some 250 miles above Earth.

Bathing

Water has always been problematic on the ISS, for a number of reasons. It’s heavy, so it comes at a premium in terms of shuttle resupplies; it doesn’t behave in microgravity; and it’s potentially dangerous considering all the electronics aboard the station. Bathing, therefore, is a tricky business. 

In the 1970s, when NASA operated its first space station, known as Skylab, astronauts used a collapsible tube shower system. But this system took about two hours per shower, mainly because every water droplet had to be painstakingly collected after bathing. On the ISS, there is no shower — astronauts have instead returned to the old-school way of washing, as used during the Gemini and Apollo missions: a simple sponge bath. 

They squirt small amounts of water and liquid soap onto their skin and use a special rinseless shampoo to wash their hair, then use towels to wipe off any remaining water. An airflow system nearby quickly evaporates excess water, preventing it from floating around the station. 

Housekeeping

Astronauts on the ISS maintain a strict cleaning schedule. The station isn’t a sterile environment, as each astronaut brings microbes from Earth that can potentially flourish on the space station. Cleanliness is therefore a serious priority in the confined environment, both to protect the people living there and the technology and ongoing experiments aboard the orbiting lab. 

Each astronaut is assigned a regular schedule to wipe down surfaces with antimicrobial wipes, including kitchen areas and sweaty exercise gear. Vacuuming — using a surprisingly standard vacuum just like we’d use on Earth — is also important, especially for cleaning the filters and vents where dust accumulates. It’s a noisy process, but at least astronauts don’t have to worry about annoying the neighbors. In space, no one can hear you clean.

Taking Out the Trash

Astronauts generate about 4.4 pounds of trash per person per day, including packaging, paper, tape, filters, food containers, and personal hygiene items. Chucking trash directly into space may seem like the simplest option, but this naturally comes with obvious ethical, practical, and safety concerns. 

Instead, astronauts have relied on a remarkably low-tech method of trash disposal. Crew members compress garbage with duct tape into bundles called “trash footballs,” which they later load onto cargo ships such as the Russian Progress or Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus. These ships then jettison the trash, leaving it to burn up during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. 

In 2022, the ISS developed a new, more efficient waste disposal method. By connecting a special waste container with a capacity of 600 pounds to an airlock, this system allows astronauts to store and dispose of larger amounts of trash. The whole container is launched from the station directly into Earth’s orbit, where it also burns up on reentry — with no cargo ships needed and no junk left in space.

Window Cleaning

You won’t find many better views than those from the windows of the ISS — but just like here on Earth, those windows need to be wiped down from time to time. Inside the station, astronauts regularly clean windows using alcohol-based wipes to remove fingerprints, condensation, and dust. But that’s the easy part. 

You may think that space, being a near-pristine vacuum, wouldn’t cloud the windows outside the station. And while the windows don’t become murky anywhere near as quickly as they do here on Earth, they do still need an occasional polish. Impacts from micrometeoroids and orbital debris, thruster firings from visiting spacecraft, and outgassing from the ISS can all leave particles that settle on the station’s exterior, including the windows. 

So the ISS windows do need to be cleaned, albeit infrequently. In 2015, for example, Russian cosmonauts took a five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk during which they wiped away grime that had accumulated on the portholes over a period of years — arguably the most extreme window-washing job imaginable.

Exercising

Free from Earth’s gravity, an astronaut’s bones and muscles can atrophy. On Earth, our bones and muscles constantly work against gravity to support our body weight, maintain posture, and help us move around. But in the microgravity of a space station, human bodies no longer need strong bones and muscles to function — so they adapt by breaking them down. 

Bones lose density because the signals telling them to rebuild cells have been removed, and muscles atrophy because they’re no longer working as hard as they do on Earth. To combat that, astronauts must exercise for about two hours per day during a long-duration mission. 

Crew members on the ISS use three exercise machines to stay in shape, which simulate weightlifting, cycling, and running. (NASA astronaut Sunita Williams even used the ISS treadmill to “complete” the Boston marathon from orbit.) 

Despite rigorous exercise programs, some astronauts still experience bone and muscle loss. It remains a critical area of research and technological innovation, especially considering future long-duration missions planned for the moon and Mars.

Maintenance and Repairs

Some of the most demanding chores on the ISS involve maintenance and repairs. Unlike space shuttles that return to Earth for servicing, the ISS never comes home, so astronauts must handle both preventive maintenance (inspection and replacement) and corrective maintenance (fixing broken equipment), which they train for on Earth before heading into orbit. 

Inside the station, astronauts repair everything from oxygen generators to water pumps and computer systems. They replace air filters, fix toilets, troubleshoot ventilation systems, and swap out failing components using spare parts stored aboard the ISS. 

The most dramatic and dangerous repairs are those that must be done outside the station. In 2007, for example, astronaut Scott Parazynski performed one of the most dangerous spacewalks in ISS history, riding on the end of a robotic arm to repair a torn solar panel. Any major repair, especially one outside the station, requires careful planning — and, sometimes, nerves of steel.

Some Chores Are Best Left on Earth

Some common chores aren’t done at all in space, either because they’re not required or because they’re simply too tricky to carry out. Doing laundry, for example, is a nonissue on the ISS. There’s no washing machine on the space station, primarily due to water constraints, so astronauts simply have a limited number of garments they wear again and again until they’re too smelly or dirty for further use (at which point they’re tossed in the trash). 

Cooking is another task that requires very little effort. There’s a permanent eight-day menu aboard the ISS, consisting of three meals and one snack a day — but it’s all prepackaged and preprepared, ready to be reheated or rehydrated in seconds (which also means there are no dishes to wash).

Aspiring astronauts in their teenage years can also breathe a sigh of relief, as there’s no need to make beds on the ISS. Sleeping in microgravity is a challenge, and there’s no real way to lie down, so astronauts instead tuck themselves into secured sleeping bags when it’s time to rest. 

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

The human body is constantly working to maintain a healthy internal temperature, roughly 97 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit. When you get hot, regulating body temperature is a relatively simple fix: You sweat, the sweat evaporates, and your body cools down. But the opposite problem, holding onto heat when it’s cold out, isn’t as straightforward.

Humans lose body heat in several ways. The majority is lost through radiation as heat naturally escapes into the surrounding air. Conduction and convection — when skin comes in contact with a cold surface or when wind moves warmth away from the body — can speed the process up as well. 

Even evaporation plays a role: Sweat or damp clothing can cause heat loss surprisingly quickly. When all this adds up, your body temperature can start to fall, and when it does, a series of wondrous physical responses kick into gear to keep you warm. Here are a few surprising ways cold can affect your body.

Involuntary Muscle Contractions

We all know the feeling: You’re cold, your teeth start chattering, and your whole body seems to shake in mini convulsions. But shivering isn’t just a side effect of being cold — it’s actually the body going on high alert. 

Shivering is a controlled energy-burning response. Small muscle contractions, an action that burns chemical energy, occur quickly and automatically. While some of that energy is channeled into movement, most of it is released as heat, warming the body from the inside out in an attempt to keep that core temperature where it should be.

The body’s brown fat kicks into gear when you get cold, too. Also known as brown adipose tissue, this special fat stores and burns small amounts of energy to help maintain body temperature, a process that ramps up when body temperature drops.

Though present in the largest amounts in babies — up to 5% of their body weight can be brown fat — adults also retain small amounts throughout the body, including in the neck, chest cavity, and along the spine. Brown fat activation and shivering are part of the body’s thermogenic response — basically an internal thermostat that kicks in when the temp drops.

Weakened Immune System

Though frigid temperatures themselves aren’t a cause of illness, being cold can make you more susceptible to getting sick. 

According to the Mayo Clinic, cold weather forces the body to work harder to maintain core temperature, which can cause your immune defenses to temporarily weaken. And a weakened immune system, of course, means viruses and bacteria have an easier time taking hold, resulting in a bit of a snowball effect — pun intended.

Cold, dry air can also strip moisture from the mucous membranes lining the nose, mouth, and throat, weakening your first line of defense against germs. At the same time, the tiny, hair-like structures known as cilia in the upper respiratory tract don’t move as efficiently in the cold, allowing viruses to inhabit the nose and throat for longer. 

Another surprising culprit? Spending more time indoors. Respiratory droplets from talking, coughing, or sneezing are smaller and lighter without humidity, which is often sapped out of indoor spaces during furnace season. This means those pesky droplets overstay their welcome, lingering in the air longer and allowing viruses to travel farther and find more unsuspecting victims.

Blood Moving to Your Core

One of the first parts of your body to get cold in chilly weather is your hands — and that’s no coincidence. As the body cools down, blood vessels near the skin’s surface constrict, pulling blood away from extremities such as the fingers, toes, ears, or nose. A lack of blood flow can even make your lips turn blue when you’re cold.

This is the body’s way of redirecting blood flow to the core and the vital organs in your core. But that protective response also forces the heart to pump against more resistance, raising blood pressure and heart rate. If you’re vulnerable to heart problems, it’s advised not to shovel or perform strenuous activities in cold weather.

A Purposefully Runny Nose

Having a runny nose when it’s cold outside isn’t exactly a surprise, but the reason it happens might be. Known as cold-induced rhinorrhea, a sudden surge of nasal fluid when body temperature drops is actually a sign of your body working to protect your lungs. 

The cold, dry air you breathe in needs to be warmed and humidified before it reaches the lungs, so the nose’s blood vessels and glands ramp up blood flow and fluid production to help make that happen. The nasal glands also produce excess mucus to keep the inside of the noise moist and reduce irritation. 

When you exhale, the warm, moist air from your lungs meets the cold air outside. As the condensation of that breath hits the cold tip of your nose, more moisture forms, causing additional cold-weather drippage.  

Sneaky Hypothermia

It’s common knowledge that cold can induce hypothermia, but it doesn’t only happen when temperatures plunge. Hypothermia can also strike in the spring and fall, when temps are relatively mild. A combination of factors can contribute to the body cooling down too quickly even when it’s not freezing out, including: wind, damp clothing, and rain, which can all draw heat away from the body faster than it can be regenerated.

Hypothermia begins when the body’s core temperature drops below 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and it can wreak quite a bit of havoc. Mild symptoms include shivering and chattering teeth, poor coordination, and sleepiness. 

As the body’s temperature falls and hypothermia progresses, more severe — and surprising — symptoms set in, including hallucinations, slurred speech, and, oddly enough, a decrease in shivering. Without treatment, hypothermia can slow vital organ function to a life-threatening point.

To stay as warm and safe as possible, whether it’s cold or just wet and windy outside, it’s best to dress in layers that balance insulation and ventilation and to keep your head, hands, and feet covered. On the days you happen to forget your gloves at home, take comfort in the fact that, luckily, your body has a few surprising ways to help pick up the slack.