Warm, Soft, Smooth and Silky! Oh, Yes!

Why is it that we enjoy soft and fluffy things? What is it that we need? What aspect of our psyche is it that can only be satisfied with this gentle touch?

It’s not just things that are soft and fluffy, of course. Smooth and silky springs to mind but that is, then, part of a basic drive that we all have. Most of us, anyway.

Somewhere, in the basement of our consciousness, is that urge to stroke, caress, something that is warm and soft and silky; that deep feeling that lurks where we can only just imagine it at the periphery of our mental vision but yet emerges in dreams to haunt and torture us.

Curiously, although we enjoy that ‘feel’ in forbidden parts, it is evident from research that we cannot actually identify anything by touch alone.

I see disbelief etched into your expression.

Try it. Blindfold someone, some unsuspecting wight and then get them to feel a variety of objects. Ask them, if you will, what it is that they are feeling.

Touch is an odd thing. It doesn’t take long before our short-term memory becomes saturated so that we no longer ‘feel’ what it is that we are in contact with. Ultimately it may become necessary to move because of discomfort but then, usually, discomfort elsewhere. For example, our hand may be on our beloved’s hip, when we are supine in bed, but the unsupported arm now starts to ache at the elbow joint necessitating a move.

If we wish to maintain a pleasurable contact it is necessary to move frequently. Not much, you never need to move very much at all, but movement is required to refresh the memory and ‘feel’ of whatever it is that we are touching.

Similarly, it is necessary to use other senses to identify what it is that we are touching. It may be that we can make an identification using memory or experience. Moving our hand from our partner’s shoulder to the elbow does not need secondary evidence because previous knowledge through the memory/experience parts of the brain will tell us where we are going and what we are touching—providing we have correctly identified the shoulder in the first place!!

All our senses do that.

Our sense of smell gets clogged up with the olfactory lobes that analyse smell and send the signal to the brain cancelling out what it is smelling so that we can identify new smells. This is a survival feature. We need to identify new dangers.

We can, by focussing our attention, shut out sounds that are irrelevant to what we are doing at the moment. The only sense that tends to ‘stick’ is taste.

For some reason, taste seems to cling. How often have we put something in our mouths, regretted it and yet, hours later, we still get that echo around our tongue?

It seems to happen less with good tastes. Odd that. Perhaps our brains are trying to imprint the memory that this is what tastes bad so we should not do it again.

All these senses, all five of them, tend to show similar characteristics. They all are inclined to point towards survival.

When we are driving the bulk of our brain capacity is centred on sight. A movement out of the corner of our eyes will cause an automatic reflex (a motor programme) that makes us look towards that movement; we analyse the movement—what is it, how fast is it moving, in what direction is it moving, is its path conflicting with ours? No danger? We look away, discarding the image immediately.

Survival. It might have been a wild beast out there. We look at it. Is it prey or predator? Our motor programme, based on knowledge and experience, will kick in and we will take action accordingly.

Then it is discarded if it has no relevance to us.

Discarded.

Like touch, scent, sound and, partially, taste.

Everything is pointed at millions of years of hard-wiring in our brain arranged for survival.

So why do we like things that are soft and furry?