A Hidden “Seventh Sense”?
New Research on Touch Without Contact
A new study from researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London suggests that our hands can sense objects before we touch them. In carefully controlled experiments, volunteers gently moved a fingertip through a tray of sand and were asked to point out where a hidden cube was buried—without actually making contact.
Surprisingly, participants located the buried object with around 70% accuracy. Their fingers were picking up tiny mechanical disturbances in the sand—subtle shifts and pressure ripples that bounce off the hidden cube and travel back through the grains. The fingertip’s dense network of mechanoreceptors converted these minute changes into signals the brain could interpret.
Researchers then compared human performance with a robotic sensor guided by a machine-learning algorithm. The robot could detect objects from slightly farther away, but produced many more false alarms. Human hands turned out to be more precise overall, highlighting just how sensitive our natural tactile system really is.
Scientists are calling this ability a kind of “remote touch,” similar to the way shorebirds like sandpipers sense prey hidden beneath wet sand with their beaks. Up to now, human touch has usually been described as a strictly “contact-only” sense. This work challenges that view and suggests that our perceptual world is richer and more extended than textbook definitions imply.
For readers interested in yangsheng and mind–body practice, this discovery is intriguing. Traditional arts such as Qigong and Taijiquan often speak of “feeling” beyond the obvious—subtle awareness of the environment, posture, and internal state. The new research does not prove concepts like “qi,” and it remains firmly within a mechanical, physical explanation. Yet it does show that the body is capable of sensing far more than we consciously realize, and that modern science is still uncovering layers of perception that earlier generations only guessed at.
