Filed under: Global Voices, Notes from left field, Snippets
Posted by: Georgia
Brainy and dirty-minded is a lethal combination, as I (being able to lay claim only to the latter) discovered when my friend Judy pounced on the quite innocent Facebook status message I posted yesterday (see image above) and accused me (publicly!) of autodermaphilia.
I truly and honestly believe the body’s largest organ to be a beautiful and marvelous thing, and I’m not alone. The BBC agrees with me, as does the US News and World Report’s Health Editor, who says, perhaps a bit gender-insensitively, that “man has never made anything better as sensor, shield, and communicator.”
This morning, my appreciation for skin is further vindicated by a post from Ethan, who’s liveblogging up a storm from the Pop!Tech 2007 conference in Camden, Maine (here’s the full list of livebloggers):
Anthropologist Nina Jablonski praises us as an audience for being, “an exceptional and alert group of primates.” (I will be more exceptional and alert with a bit more coffee.) She invites us to begin her talk by being quite primate and spend twenty seconds touching the skin of someone else in the room. She’s unsurprised when many people don’t participate in this activity - we’ve moved away from this behavior in human society, but it’s incredibly important to our primate ancestors.
Humans encounter the world primarily through our vision, followed by our touch, hearing and, least, from our sense of smell. There’s a huge amount of our brain dedicated to processing touch information. She points out that our skin is quite remarkable - it’s very sensitive, mostly naked, comes in a range of colors, is often sweaty, can be decorated and adorned.
“We gather an enormous amount of information about our environment from our skin,” especially the skin of our hands. Hands are equipped with an amazing range of nerve endings that interpret pain, deep touch, temperature.
So there you have it, Judy. Science says I’m not a pervert, but merely a self-decorating ape.
