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Seventh Sense: Can Humans Feel Objects Before Touching Them?
Would you believe that you can feel something, even before touching? Sounds strange, right? How about the seventh sense?
For centuries, human touch has been understood as a sense that works only through direct contact. You touch something, your skin reacts, and your brain interprets the signal. But new research is challenging that long-held belief, suggesting that humans may have a subtle and surprising ability to sense objects before actually touching them.
Researchers have termed this phenomenon as “remote touch”. This is a sensory ability that allows people to detect nearby objects through subtle physical signals in the environment. Scientists even believe or hint at this as a potential “seventh sense”, extending the human’s sensitivity to touch beyond the skin.
Detecting Objects Without Touching Them – The Seventh Sense?
A series of experiments was designed for a group of volunteers, and they were asked to locate a solid object buried beneath sand. The task was simple. The volunteers had to move their hands through the sand and indicate when they sensed an object hidden beneath the surface. If you think that is impossible, here’s the twist! Most of the participants were able to locate the object even before they actually touched it.
You might wonder if it was luck or guesswork. The result was something beyond. Each chance was a better one, and the volunteers consistently kept detecting the object correctly. All these by sensing extremely subtle changes in the movement and resistance of the sand around it. The research team’s experimental results from the “seventh sense” are reported at the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL).
How Does “Remote Touch” Work?
The key “sense” here is the tiny mechanical signals. When a finger moves through any object, for instance, sand or any granular material, there will be changes in the microenvironment. The grains shift, compress, and flow in complex ways. But the buried objects disrupt this movement, creating faint pressure patterns and vibrations that travel through the surrounding material.
Although these signals are subtle and incredibly weak, the human nervous system appears capable of noticing these patterns. Our fingertips are packed with sensitive receptors that detect minute changes in force and motion, well before contact occurs.
Quick fact: This ability is not unique to Humans alone!
Lessons From Nature and Robots
Some shorebirds, including sandpipers and plovers, use a similar strategy to locate prey hidden beneath sand or mud. Without directly seeing their prey, they sense pressure waves generated by the prey’s movement beneath the surface (du Toit et al. 2020; de Fouw et al. 2016). Though humans lack the specialized anatomy like that of these birds, the research shows that we can achieve comparable outcomes with our hands, possibly through a shared principle underlying this seventh sense of touch.
To explore more, especially the limits of this remote touch, scientists also compared human performance with that of robotic tactile sensors using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm. Both could achieve remote touch, but humans surpassed robots. Although robots could detect objects from slightly greater distances, the precision was only 40% and was accompanied by frequent false positives. In contrast, humans marked about 70.7% precision within the expected detectable range, showing better accuracy and reliability.
Why This Discovery Matters?
This study serves as a reminder that the human body still holds hidden capabilities. Even in an age dominated by technology and AI, the mystery of the human senses, including the emerging concept of a seventh sense, remains to be uncovered. This shapes a different perspective on perceiving touch. Understanding this mechanism would create a greater impact on creating robotics and prosthetic design for search-and-rescue technologies, where sensing objects without direct contact is critical.
