A grueling election cycle, partisan vitriol, and our recent local bitter public debate on homelessness underscore not just deep differences in opinions, but real animosity even between and within friends and families.

There seems to be little tolerance or interest for understanding the motivations on the ‘other side.’   We don’t feel each other's pain, preferring to inflict it. We live in an empathy desert. Folks attribute this dearth of compassion to a number of factors, including the pandemic. Unknown to almost all, is that humans, like other social mammals, have a built-in, hard-wired layer of our nervous system that helps us regulate emotions and generate empathy.

 Luckily, I’ve spent the last 5 years (venture capital funded, full disclosure) running a lab investigating that system and designing therapeutic technologies to strengthen it. Seems a bit odd, though. Why create artificial methods to stimulate a natural system? Can’t we just use the system the way it was created? That’s the rub.

 This system is naturally strengthened by one kind of stimulation. Simple, light, slow touch. Think of a mother caressing an infant, chimpanzees grooming each other, elephants entwining their trunks, even whales sliding against each other. The technical term is “affective touch.” That type of touch is the primary way the emotional system is regulated and strengthened and yet it is something we rarely get.

Regular affective touch helps us make good, adapted decisions about our feelings. We will be calmer, feel a sense of belonging and, further, generate compassion and empathy. Less touch means we have a harder time processing our body’s feelings. We experience fear, anxiety, even panic. We have a weaker sense of the emotions of others, so less compassion and less empathy.

Think about it this way. We all have the capacity to see in the dark. If you take me out of Cranston and drop me in the dark plains of South Dakota, I can’t see a darned thing at night. Leave me there a few nights, and I become surprisingly good at seeing in the dark. Same goes for affective touch. There are neat studies that show that regular stimulation of this system, 20 minutes a day, improves how we feel, and changes areas in our brain (the insula) that process this information, for the better. We have done such studies, one collaboration local (Butler Hospital).

 Other studies (and common sense) suggest the lack of touch, especially in infancy, impairs later emotional regulation. Enough touch, especially for youngsters, builds a base of emotional stability and ongoing touch supports a lifetime of connectedness and empathy. Without it, we become anxious, reactive, and inured to the pain of others. The solution is almost trivial. Biology built a system to regulate our feelings and connect us to the feelings of others. And it can be strengthened by simple, gentle touch.

But I don’t suppose folks will just start gently caressing their friends’ forearms. You can practice on your dog or cat. They have the same built-in system. Your anxious dog will grow calmer. Is a little gentle touch among friends worth it for a world with more empathy? We shall see.

A Cranston resident, Dr. Hagberg was a Clinical Asst. Prof. of Neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico for the last 12 years and VP for Research at Feelmore Labs (Brooklyn, NY) for the last 5 years where he led lab and clinical research on affective touch.