Touch is the starting point of intimacy. The foundation of our social world is nurture not reproduction/sex. Reproduction/sex is part of the physical world and common to all animals but it does break the singularity of animals and in doing this requires its own intimacy model. In the social world, its strong registers require constant managing, negotiation and framing. Nurture also requires the biological development of a basic intimacy model in order to allow for touch which is experienced as beneficial (feeling satisfied/ happy). This overcomes the basic touch model which is defensive allowing only for obtaining food. Every time you touch or are touched by another animal, including a human being – even one you have lived with for forty years with considerable episodic richness of intimacy - you will either encounter the basic touch model or the basic intimacy model. The touch will either be unwelcome or welcomed and often acted on without any other registers and their modeling being involved. Nurture contains a rich world of satisfying touch and social animals continue to use this beyond rearing young as a key element of their lives. Shortly after growling and snarling at each other over a kill, lions will rest with their bodies touching.
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The word intimacy refers to what seems like a reality that is indescribable but at the same time lived. Beyond mathematics and science, beyond clear description and more about feelings than facts. It is a word perfect for helping our understanding of both animal and human nature. Human nature is distinct from other animal natures due to the presence and activity of a mind. What makes it perfect is the way that we use the word intimacy, for example in relation to the sense of touch, the presence of the uncovered human body and when talking about our feelings and vulnerabilities. Why is its range so considerable? Intimacy is not just a human relationship option. It is the key to understanding the nature of animal sex, nurture and society.
We begin with two examples of lived experience that set up the power and deep presence of intimacy.
Example 1
A large study was carried out on the steps of a city library in the US. Over a number of days those leaving the library were asked to rate their experience of the library – did they find the book they were looking for, did the library have a good range of books, how easy was it to find their way around the library, were the staff friendly and many more questions. Those doing the survey had no idea that there was another part of the research project. This revealed that those people who gave the library high ratings were very likely to have been those ‘accidently' touched, hand to hand, by a librarian as they checked out their books. The effect was slightly greater for the friendliness of the staff question. All the supposedly thought provoking questions asked in a very ‘neutral’ setting were overwhelmed by the largely unrecalled slight touch of a librarian. This was a very clever piece of research as the trick is to identify a social setting where it is possible for a strange human being to get round the defended intimate space of others. Let us imagine that the survey was carried out without the ‘touch’ part of it. It reveals that a lot of people think that the range of books is not wide enough. The library invests in a wider range of books also incurring the cost of more space. We can hear them laughing at the wise person who points out that customer satisfaction on the matter could have been achieved more easily and cheaply by training staff to accidentally touch the hands of library users. Notice that in the library ‘experiment’ the encounters were with another human and that the ‘contacts’ were experienced as beneficial (see the emotion topic).
Example 2
The power of the ‘space of possible social touch’ (proximate touch) in humans, can be seen in an activity used in group work with adults with learning disabilities severe enough to deprive them of language. The participants can be lying down or standing up. They keep still. Holding a finger an inch away from their body a trusted adult slowly draws an imaginary line around their body. They start at a hand and trace along the arm, down the side of the body to the feet, around each leg in turn, up the other arm, over the head and back to the starting point. The participants generally stay very still throughout. They enjoy the experience and become excited (very interested) when they realise that the activity is being prepared.
Imagine a simple organism moving in space and having encounters. It evolves appropriate ways of evading or defending against some encounters that want to eat it and it evolves ways of finding and consuming other encounters. All its ‘object’ encounters are registered directly on, and in, its body and none exist beyond its body. As well as registering ‘objects’ it ‘registers’ its environment which at this stage is water. This is also a felt medium. Physicality dominates its existence. The organism only exists in the immediate space where other objects touch it or enter into its body. This is intimate space. Though this space enriches and expands according to the senses, registers and range of the limbs available to the animal, all animals have a surprisingly small intimate space around their bodies.
The intimate space is divided into two parts. Firstly the ‘space of possible touch’(proximate touch), immediately close to the body, and contact with the body, directly or by pressure (as through the outer body or clothing).
Our intimate space still hugs our body, despite ‘reaching out registers’ such as hearing, smell and pheromones, excellent sight that tracks movement around us (over distance and in detail) and our ability to talk and listen well beyond our bodies.
Intimate space can be clearly seen at the most intense point of nonphysical contact between two humans, face to face. We stand close, so that we can signal through facial expression while trying to feel/sense one another’s ‘real’ feelings and emotional state. If the face of the other is too close to ours then we perceive threat sufficiently strongly for it to switch on a movement model (note that it does not need to go through focused attention) and we find ourselves stepping back. If the threat continues we may step into the others face – choosing fight rather than flight. The ‘choice’ of fight over flight is the work of the hormone testosterone, and it’s associated modeling. The comfortable distance face to face is the same as the distance walking side by side.
We also have common animal responses to being touched by another animal outside of a modeling encounter i.e. unexpectedly. This is a cross species phenomenon related to the detection of movement – a mouse touching a bird. The touch is perceived by the modeler for the emotion of interest/excitement (felt at the level of surprise) strongly enough to switch on movement models that take part, or all of us, away from the point of touch. We then assess the situation. It is interesting to consider a packed crowd on a tram or train. Being uncomfortably close, touch and face to face contact are studiously avoided with a great deal of focused attention going to maintaining this situation. Those present are experiencing an episode in the ‘space of possible human touch’. If it so packed that people are forced to touch each other then they stop adjusting their movement, unless it is to move away, and stand very still. We feel uncomfortable until we can end the situation.
Nurture
In mammals after birth, food for further growth is provided by the female in the form of milk. This is paralleled by developmental protection involving various mixes of mother, father and group members. Nurture modeling does occur in other animals most obviously in birds. The practise of nurturing carried with it the advantage that more complex animals could evolve. Nurture could be extended over time to accommodate the slower progress of a more complex animal towards becoming a fertile member of the species.
Nurture requires physical and social proximity and touch and therefore the development of nurture modeling in the body/brain of both the mother and the ‘baby’. The defensive intimate model that defends our body has to be overpowered. We will look at this more detail later, firstly more insights about the nature of nurture.
For all mammals the integrated movement and episodic models involved in nurture can be re-cognised if the conditions are right. Human beings are very good at re-creating these conditions for other animals primarily by touching or stroking the animal while simultaneously providing food.
In order for a hamster, cat, dog or ferret to tolerate being stroked the experience has to be registered with ‘beneficial’ as the dominant emotion. In other words they must feel satisfied /happy. The episode being registered includes the beneficial emotion because it includes rich content around identifying and consuming food. The episode is also an extended one as the eating and stroking continues for minutes. These animals also have an expressed biological model for being calmed while being licked. Licking and stroking are related, stroking having evolved from licking via nuzzling. The animals therefore already have a nurture model for being fed and calmed (lowering the level of the apprehension/fear emotion) while being licked.
The human must also benefit from stroking, intimately touching, the animal or they would not do it. As and when satisfied/ happy weakens, then other emotional registers will take over movement and focused attention and irritation /anger, apprehension / fear and interest /surprise will largely shape this. In the case of interest / surprise you might find that you stop stroking to examine a lump under your cats coat and then become anxious. Remember it is competing deep perceptual modeling that is determining how you feel not your thought/mind though it may jump in on the act at any point but not necessarily in harmony with what you ‘feel’. Indeed it and/or a dialogue can change the episodic process through the semantic-episodic link that we have already examined. ‘Why are you stroking that smelly ferret?’ The most likely scenario here is that your irritation/anger becomes the dominant emotion, probably within a rich store of episodes of the same type. In the physical and social world you may continue stroking the ferret but the pleasure has literally gone, but your mind may not admit this as it would contradict a belief such as I like stroking my ferret.
Most pets are animals that are generally handled co-terminus with nurturing but feeding and the care of injured animals can tap into an animal’s nurturing episodic and movement memory and re-cognise it. These relationships can be ‘created’ between many animals not just between animals and humans. They tend to be limited to conditions established and maintained by humans but the fact that cats and mice and cats and dogs can comfort each other in intimate contact is another reminder of the extreme power of beneficial touch. It can even compete with the need for food.
One way to test the strength of the beneficial touch model within nurture is to set it against the need of the young animal for nutrition and liquid. When a female monkey is breast feeding, its offspring is hugging its mother and benefiting from the touch. It feels satisfied/ happy, as does its mother. Is the model governing the actions of the young monkey in clinging to its mother specifying ‘clinging on’ in order to avoid starvation and dehydration or is it a beneficial touch (social) model? Clearly both mother and young have to register beneficial touch in order to overcome the basic, i.e. defensive, intimate model but how strong is it?
What happens when we separate ‘clinging on’ from receiving nutrition and liquid. A well-known controversial experiment took young monkeys away from their mothers and put them together in a cage. They were provided with a wire mesh structure shaped a bit like a monkey that had tubes bringing milk to teats. At the other end of the cage was the same structure covered in fur but with no teats. The young monkeys chose to ‘live’ on the fur structure and went to the teat structure only when hungry or thirsty.
Mammals can experience intense ‘beneficial touch nurture’ over long periods of time. It is, however, always based on the need to overcome the basic defensive model of intimate space. The basic model is defensive except for food modeling and can be easily accessed. No I don’t want a cuddle I am annoyed by what you just said.
Talk intimately together and you will move, without ‘mind’ noticing, towards and into each others intimate space. You may feel an impulse to touch. This is often when we touch a shoulder or arm. In some cultures your clothes touch with some pressure on each others bodies. In our sex obsessed society this is assumed to be sexual in nature. It is no such thing. There is a very good reason for ‘being careful’ however. Intimacy often travels with sex. However sex has its own separate model for overcoming the basic defensive intimate model. Because they travel together touch between the genders is more guarded. Beneficial touch also varies within genders. It is obvious in females and generally disguised in males. In males it encounters stronger biological models of fighting and sex. In terms of day to day continuous experience, beneficial touch and other intimacies built on it (quickly think of us talking and baboons grooming) are essential to many mammalian social animals and far more evident than sex.
Lets’ look in more detail at how we navigate this complex world of beneficial social touch. In our social world, when to touch who, where and when is both complex and flexible. It varies between cultures but there is also a common pattern. Customs of greeting involve smiling, thereby showing your unclenched teeth, and standard words and sentences. In addition they often involve ritual touching ‘through’ the intimate spaces of the parties involved. In order to show that you do not intend to fight, you offer and hold each others skilled (dominant) hand. The one in seven of us who are left handed, have to use the support hand instead. To be really convincing you can hold out both arms and clutch each others shoulders. The trouble with this method is that it brings your faces too close together. To get round this both parties put their head on the left side of the partners head. They may touch cheeks if it feels right. Both male and female use the last method leading to a common greeting. Where the shaking of hands is the usual form, women embrace in a version of the two arm approach. Men and women meeting each other often do not break the intimate space. If they do greet each other they generally just smile and talk and sometimes shake hands. In some cultures the gesture of touching one’s own heart is used. If they know each other well enough they may engage in a more restrained version of the embrace. Whenever the intimate spaces are mutually entered a great deal of specific individual sensitivities and feelings are involved.
We have already seen that it is not enough for the permitted social touch to be allowed. This would not be an energised state. It can be socially forced but any further overriding of the basic defensive intimate model requires that the social touch is beneficial. The only way that nurture can work is by overcoming the defensive intimate space model by using the power of an emotion. The only candidate emotion is satisfied happy with its perceptual model of beneficial. We will call this specific modeling the basic intimacy model. In addition the model must trigger high registers of its emotion in order to counter the strong emotions of threat and difficulty.
Do not attempt this experiment at home! Individual rats were put into an electrified cage and subject to random unpleasant/painful electric shocks. The random element meant that the rats couldn’t in any way anticipate when the shock would arrive. Their degree of fear was measured by the levels of cortisol in their blood stream. The levels were very high. They were animated to escape the cage. These were laboratory rats used to cages. They did not look frightened.-
Among the problems that we have in understanding emotion are display ‘politics’ and how we openly express emotion. Other species do not express feelings or do not express them in the way that we do. We assume that they are not feeling them. We use this assumption ourselves; “I was terrified of that climb”. “I wouldn’t have known. You did not look frightened and did it so confidently”. Remember we also have the even more confusing possibility that the person is saying that they were frightened when they were not. There are many reasons why they would do this.
-Then the experimenters put a second rat into the cage and repeated the electric shocks as before. The cages were relatively small and the rats were either in, or close to, each others intimate space and were often touching. The cortisol levels of the rats went down significantly. The power of the rat’s basic intimacy model was strong enough to limit an intense register of the powerful emotion of apprehension/fear. Similarly when we are with a ‘companion’ we feel less anxious. If on our own facing a threat, a very strong modeled register for us would be to find company.
Our experience of physical contact with those who we let into our intimate space is a source of great satisfaction and happiness. “Why do you stay with him / her?” “It would be too stressful and risky to go through the long process of finding someone else to cuddle and sleep very close to every night”. Human beings as a species have great fear of the night.
Another insight into the power of the defence of intimate space is the tension around mouth kissing. We have identified the focused point of human to human contact as being face to face encounter. If someone comes too close then we step back. When we kiss the person we step forward. Reading the situation running up to what might be the first kiss is delicate and sensitive. Even in long term relationships it’s a delicate act. Mouth kissing is generally restricted to those in a sexual relationship. Even in the glorious nursing home (modern life) it is okay to mouth kiss your partner in public but it is a surprisingly rare encounter and should be brief.
Summary
Every animal that has intimate space intrusion and physical touch with either a mate (sex ) or with offspring (nurture) needs an overriding emotionally based model made up of perceptual modeling and biochemical registers. Both the carer(s) and the young have to have models for beneficial intimacy. The only candidate emotion is satisfied /happy, the beneficial emotion. This has to sufficiently dominate over unpredictability, threat and difficulty, in order to achieve both fertilisation and offspring survival. The perceptual models for sexual and offspring intrusion, are existentially different but they use the same emotion, though with some differences in biochemistry and register levels. Episodic and related movement modeling develops and enriches these as it does all encounter and activity.
In the case of humans; with echoes in other social animals; we show how the combination of the basic intimacy model and a movement model create our social world. Intimacy, movement and shared attention.