Paper Stacking: Repsonse to Excerpts from Diane Ackerman's Touch

  I honestly had not realised how important the sense of touch is.  I understood it from a survival sense, in that a sensation of pain on the skin allows us to know when we have been injured so that we can take proper care of the injury and ensure our overall health.  I understood it from the sense of a romantic relationship, the sense of longing for the physical presence of the other person after being away from them for a long period of time, just wanting to be held, to be next to someone warm.  The horror you feel at end of a relationship at the realisation that you can't touch that person anymore.  You can't kiss them, you can't hold them, and you can't caress their skin anymore.
  My graphic design teacher said something yesterday about why texture and three-dimensional elements are important to graphic design, even though it is most often thought of as a two-dimensional field.  She said that our sense of touch is important to confirming to us that something is real.  We see it with our eyes, yes, but we still must feel something to know exactly what or how it is, to know that it is what we thought it was, to know that it's safe.  So I began to understand it that way, as well.  Diane Ackerman made a similar point when she said that we use our sense of touch to gain an understanding of ourselves, that a mirror would be useless to us if we could not also touch ourselves to understand what we look like in three-dimensions and where we are in space.  I suppose I had known this in some way, but I had not thought about it consciously.
  What got to me the most was the story Ackerman told in the beginning, about premature babies functioning better when they were regularly touched.  I had heard about the rats being licked on an episode of NPR's Radiolab, but they talked about it in a way that was more scientifically linked to the rats' likelihood for health complications or readiness for reproduction than about their general well being, and I had not thought about the effect that would have on an animal, or a person.  When she talked about the monkeys that had been deprived of being touched and the problems that resulted from this deprivation, I realised how important it is to psychological and physiological health.  My long-distance boyfriend and I are going through an argument right now and potentially breaking up, against my will, so this struck a particularly loud and poignant chord with me personally.  Ackerman says, "In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touch-starved."  And I thought about how true that was.  Our relationship would seem better if I could just see his face, for one thing.  But I couldn't not think about how badly I just wanted to stand there and hold him, how much better that would make me feel.