Where would we be – Without ‘Vitamin-T’?
Monday May 13th, 2024
Speaker: Professor Francis McGlone, a neuroscientist from Manchester Metropolitan University.
It is now known that some skin nerves send ‘feel good’ signals to the brain when stimulated by gentle stroking touch, and that this kind of touch may play an all-important role in social brain development – and a great deal more! Research into the senses of touch has focussed mainly on the fingertips, described, in an analogy with vision, as the ‘fovea’ of this sensory modality. We have a reasonably good understanding of the specialised mechanoreceptors in the fingers that code for touch, and how their exquisite sensitivity enables us to detect the microscopic physical surface properties of handled objects, such as their roughness, smoothness or softness. Information from these receptors is conveyed to discriminative sensory areas of the brain by fast-conducting myelinated nerve fibres, enabling this information to be processed in ‘real-time’ – an important factor when handling objects or tools having been touched. However, touch has another function beyond the purely discriminative that we are all familiar with – an affiliative or affective (pleasant) one. Relatively recent research has discovered a novel class of gentle touch sensitive nerves in the skin, called c-tactile afferents (CT), that I hope to convince you are as important to our mental wellbeing as Vitamin-D is to our physical wellbeing.
About the speaker:
Prof Francis McGlone
Francis is a neuroscientist with a long term interest in the function of the different classes of nerves innervating the skin, and in particular those that code for pain, itch (for which an Ig-Nobel prize was awarded), and a more recently discovered class of skin nerves that code for the ‘pleasure’ of touch – not the touch we sense, but the touch we feel!. Techniques used in this research span single-unit recordings from peripheral nerves in humans (akin to ‘wire-tapping’) with microneurography, psychophysical measurements, functional neuroimaging, behavioural measures, and psychopharmacological approaches to investigate the role of the brain transmitters such as serotonin in affiliative and social touch. He is co-director of the International Association for the Study of Affective Touch (IASAT), trustee at the Pain Relief Foundation, member of the Human Space Flight lab (Johns Hopkins, USA), and has published over 300 papers.
Bollington SciBar 