Memory and Touch
Iva Apostolova (St. Paul University)
Over the past year and a half or so, I have been preoccupied with touch, and more specifically, the role of the faculty of touch in the formation of the sense of self. It turns out, touch is pretty important. Thus far, my thesis is that the faculty of touch is foundational for the formation of the sense of self. I have found support for my claim in some unusual places (unusual for an Analytic philosopher like me, anyway), namely in the works of M. Klein, T. Ogden, and A. Freud.
I also observed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that philosophy has often relied on vision as an exemplary sense perception. From Plato to Descartes to Jackson, philosophers, with minor exceptions, have propelled a pictorial, imagistic versions of perception.
Vision serves as the baseline metaphor for awareness and mental awakening. The prisoner who leaves Plato’s cave is originally blinded by the sunlight but then, becomes enlightened - that is, he allows light into his mind; Jackson’s Mary, the scientist who leaves the black-and-white room she's occupied since birth, sees colors for the first time and becomes aware of qualia; Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt starts with a dream-image of the philosopher seeing himself sitting by the fire. The list goes on.
As a result, touch has received sporadic, at best, attention in the philosophical literature. This, in turn, has prevented a serious consideration of the participation of touch in the formation of the sense of self, more generally. Until more recently, that is, with Antonio Damasio’s exploration of the evolutionary role of touch in the formation of organic consciousness.
Briefly, as per the Ogdenian-Kleinian-Freudian account of touch, the very rudimentary and primal act of touching various surfaces, which accounts for the earliest psychological connections, is really what allows us to organize our experience and create a background of “sensory boundedness” that accompanies all our psychological states. By allowing the object to make direct impressions on the surface of the skin, the self begins to form a nascent understanding of the interplay between self and other, subject and object.
This outlook on touch and the emergence of the self very much echoes recent research on the faculty of touch and the curious phenomenon of peripersonal space. Research on peripersonal space has identified several types of touch. In addition to the paradigmatic direct touch, there are several other species of touch: contiguous touch (feeling the warmth of a fire, for example), projection touch, which often ends up as the fascinating distal touch.
Categorizing touch by genus, according to Matthen’s taxonomy, there are two basic classes of touch – tactile and haptic touch. Tactile touch is subjective and phenomenal; it is, in essence, how things feel to the subject herself. Tactile sensations, through the skin receptors, are what give us the paradigmatic direct touch. In contrast, haptic touch, or haptic perception, is objective in that it “delivers objective awareness of things outside— things like the pencil in your hand and the breeze playing on your face.”
Haptic perception is responsible for distal touch where the subject can sense an object that she is not in direct contact with - by using a tool, for example. I can sense the surface of the paper through the pen I am holding to it. So, Matthen concludes, when we talk about touch, there are two distinct sensory events that happen side by side, as opposed to one sensation with two distinct aspects.
This “objectness” of haptic perception points us to its spatial nature (it is worth noting that tactile sensation, by contrast, is not spatial). The spatiality of haptic perception is, in fact, crucial as it is in this particular trait that we understand its connection to the other senses, particularly to vision. Understanding spatiality, Matthen argues, brings understanding of one’s own self.
If I understand where I stand vis-à-vis the trees around me, it means that I have already understood where I end and the trees begin, as well as, approximately, how far away they are, how much effort it will take me to go around them, etc. All this calculation is a product of a complex integrated perceptual system. For example, spatial orientation requires updating background information, which is provided by such senses as proprioception (the awareness of one’s bodily position), kinesthesis (the feeling of motion), and of course, vision.
Peripersonal space, then, is the space between the subject and the object, between the self and the other. While peripersonal space does not have a well delineated spatial boundary, it, roughly, encompasses my body, its edges, and its immediate surroundings.
It is within this space that we, as cognitive and social agents
- i.e., agents-in-the-world -
determine what is safe and unsafe for us to come into contact with.
It is within this space that we reach and probe the other,
be it an object or another agent like us.
A part of the great importance of peripersonal space comes from its ties to “self-location and body ownership”, without which a proper contact with the world would, in fact, be inconceivable .
My own position on the self, which is a constructivist one to be sure, seems to agree with Fulkerson’s stipulation that a more accurate account of the self is bottom-up. Under this account, the construction of the self requires bodily self-awareness. Bodily self-awareness and the ensuing sense of self-location are at the core of the sense of self.
Fulkerson sees the bottom-up approach as sympathetic to a Humean bundle theory of the self, according to which the self is nothing more but a bundle of perceptions/experiences. I want to resist going that far, and instead find William James’ view that the self is not really a substance far more acceptable. In this sense, I agree that our self-awareness is a result of cooperative dynamic integrative multisensory neural mechanisms, which, even more importantly, are distributed.
Where does memory fit in all this?
There is a significant body of literature that links memory and personal identity, understood as the thing that makes somebody who they are, and which persists through time. Clearly, memory has a role to play here. It’s just a question of how much and in what capacity exactly. Philosophy wouldn’t be the discipline that it is without allowing the co-existence of polar opposite views. On one such view, personal identity is not a thing, but an illusion, or a convenient social construct.
To avoid getting marred in definitional and conceptual dodges, some philosophers, myself including, prefer to talk about the sense of self, instead. Everyone has a sense of their own self, at least to some extent. If memory is involved in the sense of self, and if touch at least informs or even forms the sense of self, then there should be a strong connection between touch and memory.
Neurophysiological and neuropsychological research have, of course, already mapped out tactile and haptic memory, especially with regards to the micro- and macrogeometric stimulus properties which help with spatial orientation. And as discussed earlier, spatial orientation is central for a bottom-up account of the sense of self. It is also reassuring that these researchers reach similar conclusions vis-à-vis the analogy and cooperation between visual and tactile sensory systems within the brain, as well as the dual path system for the representation of touch (i.e., the haptic and the tactile ones).
But, of course, what is being taken for granted by both neurophysiology and neuropsychology, without being properly problematized, is the fact of embodiment, which quickly becomes complicated when it comes to memory, particularly in the framework of touch. Is tactile and haptic memory only short-term memory, confined to the specious present, or does it have long-term consequences? And how does that affect the sense of self?
On the other hand, the literature on healing and respectively, on the traumatic properties of touch (almost always in psychology or health sciences, especially in nursing) either only deals with memory in passing, or resorts to metaphors à la van der Kolk (“the body keeps the score”) without clearly indicating how exactly touch gets processed, stored, and retrieved in memory, and whether or how this has to do with embodiment, and consequently, with the sense of self.
With the increased attention to AI, the possibility of non-human type of consciousness, and the emergence of the tech-care sector, the role of touch in inter-personal (and inter-species) relations has become even more prominent, and the significance of embodiment even more urgent to comment on. There is a significant philosophical work to be done, in both conceptual cleanup, definitional awareness, mapping out, and classifying when it comes to memory and touch.
