7
Touch
Amazon Parrots
They knew it was happening even before the shell was breached. They heard and felt a gentle—but urgent—rocking. Something grayish-black begins to push through: a chick. A second and third follow, and before long, there are three gaping, crying mouths reaching up to their parents’ beaks. Mother and father, crossing beaks briefly, bend down to greet their children’s eager faces. Father flies off, returning within minutes to offer regurgitated fruit to the newborns. Beaks almost larger than the heads that support them are open wide. Beseeching voices, mixed with joy and anxious need, pull the parents closer as they feed and touch the nest full of new chicks.
Touch is the earliest form of sensory and growth-promoting experience that teaches infants to be a member of their species, their family, and their community.1 Even precocial species, such as Rattlesnakes, cluster together and sleep coiled upon one another, scaled bodies wrapped together.2 This intimate contact develops a sensitivity to mother and kin smell,3 an important sense for Snakes as well as humans and other Animals.
Physical touch assists an infant in developing self-regulation by maintaining contentment or optimal arousal for a growth-promoting biochemistry.4 It embodies a reassuring connection, which activates calming hormones such as oxytocin.5 Children learn how to be in the world via touch. As Gabor Maté observes, “Tactile contact is the newborn’s earliest experience of the world. It is how we first receive love.”6 Even though it may vary across species, loving, responsive touch is critical for all young.
To the untrained human eye an egg may exist outside the mother, but its shell and the bodily touch of brooding serves as an extension of connection through touch. Life emerges in relationship, and when a chick is born and the shelter of the egg is lost, the connection of touch is retained. Security is immediately replaced by welcoming parental care and the physical nest. Bird nested care is designed to safeguard babies and optimize parents’ ability to connect with their young through touch. Mealy Parrots, who are one of the thirty-one spectacular Amazon Parrot species,7 are a perfect example.
Mealy, Yellow-Naped, Yellow-Headed, Blue-Fronted, and other Amazon Parrots generally measure eight to twelve inches (twenty to thirty centimeters) from beak to tail, depending on the species. They weigh ten to twenty ounces (almost three hundred to six hundred grams) on average, with mainly green plumage streaked with striking blue, red, and yellow feathers found on various parts of the body, including fluorescent pigments that absorb and reemit ultraviolet light.8 Their beaks are large relative to the size of their bodies, and they have prehensile foot-hands that can wrest open tough nuts and grab branches with strength and efficacy. While every Amazon Parrot species is distinct and unique, their methods of childcare are similar enough to draw some commonalities.9
A male-female pair and their children form the Amazon Parrot’s evolved nest’s social nucleus. After meeting, courting, and falling in love, the pair nests. When preparing a nest, these Central American Parrots “interior decorate” ready-made cavities in the boles of tall old-growth Trees such as Terminalia amazonia (commonly known, depending on locale, as roble coral, amarillón, or guyo) and Dialium guianense (ironwood, granadillo, tamarindo). The mother Amazon Parrot lays two to seven eggs inside, and within a month or so, the eggs break open and enormous beaks—far out of proportion to the babies’ tiny, wet bodies—poke out, mouths wide open to greet their parents and demand their first taste of food outside the shell. Both mother and father Yellow-Naped Amazon Parrots provide nourishment in the form of regurgitated seeds and fruit. Whether physically or auditorily, they are in sustained connection with their chicks to maintain synchrony.
As dawn colors the sky, Parrots waken from their treetop roosts and begin calling to each other. Flock cohesion is maintained by being in nearly constant contact with each other. Morning calls are routinely accompanied by grooming and allogrooming ceremonies, when Parrots care for their feathers and those of their loved ones. Parrot evolved nests are appropriately referred to as a “nucleus” because the family is a fractal of the greater psychosocial cloud of the flock. Within each nest, Parrots preen each other with the meticulousness of a fine jeweler and the tenderness of a lover, spending hours touching and exchanging murmurs of affection.
All Animals groom, and their reasons are similar. In Birds, preening keeps their feathers—up to twenty-five thousand per Bird, on average—clean and neat. Clean means free of bacteria, dust, and other particulate matter that might cause infection. Neat means every feather, from the large wing feather to the tiniest innermost fluff, must be clean and in place for effective, safe function. Like airplanes whose mechanics are in disrepair, a Parrot with wet or disarrayed feathers will have impaired flight. Feathers also keep a Bird’s body dry. Even though they live in the tropics, Amazon Parrot feathers help the Bird adjust to changes in humidity and temperature.
Grooming also activates protective substances. Birds and Beavers have essential oils that grooming plumbs and spreads throughout their bodies. For Beavers, such oils keep them dry and fortify their fur’s ability to keep them warm. Emperor Penguins possess a uropygial gland near the base of the tail that produces a waxy substance that keeps feathers flexible and waterproof. Parrots lack these glands, and instead they have specialized feathers that disintegrate into “powder down,” a dust that looks like dandruff.
Aside from physical practicalities, grooming and allogrooming are means for communication and connection. Language and grooming are the audible and tactile webbing that connects everyone. Parrot preening and allopreening ceremonies are particularly important in the morning, during daytime rest periods, and before nightfall. These are check-in points to see how each other is doing physically and emotionally, and to make sure everyone made it through the night and back home after day is done. Allopreening is not limited to life partners. It includes other flock members and begins before birth. By definition, touch starts with conception. Babies take form inside in their mothers, in connection, in contact. An embryo’s mind and body draw from maternal embodiment and first know their mothers through feel and touch.
When they are born, human infants experience a radical change in feeling and touch with vaginal birth, beginning what Ashley Montagu refers to as “the tactile stage.” Mammalian infants experience the contracting uterus, pressure from the pelvic bones that jump-starts the child’s body systems. This is especially critical for human babies, since their mothers do not lick them—unlike other Mammal mothers and their babies. Human babies who experience surgical birth by cesarean section miss the vaginal welcome, but they can benefit immensely from postnatal massage as a way to mimic natural birthing.10 Nursing, holding, and caressing during the first two years of life reflect the whole-body holding environment of exterogestation. At birth, the skin learns adaptive responses to a felt environment that includes “air movements, gases, particles, parasites, viruses, bacteria, changes in pressure, temperature, humidity, light, radiation, and much else.”11 A carer’s touch is one way in which a child learns how to adjust to ongoing changes without excessive stress. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson described touch as critical in humans’ first two years of life, when children build their sense of trust—or, conversely, without responsive care, distrust. Full companionship care includes trust in Nature, specifically the local ecological environment, as essential to the circle of trust.
Young Animals expect to be cherished by their parents. Needs are to be noticed and met without much signaling by the offspring required, much like the Japanese notion of amae or friendship.12 In amae, the needs of another are picked up subliminally and met without the need for vocalized language. This concept is similar to how pediatrician and therapist D. W. Winnicott described mothers who spend the early weeks of their child’s life in an infant-preoccupied state (primary maternal preoccupation). This preoccupation allows the mother to know and anticipate the infant’s needs without the infant needing to signal, a communication capacity that the infant will not develop until later.13
Skin-to-skin contact facilitates “motherliness” and “total relatedness,” which infants require for healthy development.14 After the embodied synchrony experienced during pregnancy, mothers move into interactional synchrony with their newborns using multiple sensory and cognitive channels, the most basic of which is touch. In the first hours after birth, contact has long-lasting effects on the infant’s self-regulation and maternal-child relational co-regulation.15
The mother-child dyad is symbiotic. Physical connection with baby is just as vital for the mother as it is for the infant. Body-to-body contact immediately after birth helps a mother’s body contract the uterus, expel the placenta, and prevent hemorrhage.16 Human mothers also need supportive care that allows for greater touch and bonding with baby. Family members, doulas, birth coaches, and other community members help in this process by providing the mother with a period of “lying in” that allows her to heal and the mother-child dyad to focus on bonding and relating.17
Touch involves more than these intimate exchanges. It pervades and relates to all our senses. While those of us living in the anthropocentric world of mind and objectification might overlook it, we are immersed in a world of touch. Even in modern society, touch is always with us. Clothes, wind, humidity, and whatever we encounter involve some form of contact.18 Touch even infuses our language. We describe others as “in touch” or “out of touch,” “abrasive” or “soft.” Someone who is unyielding is described as “hard,” and a friendly, loving person is “warm.” Interactions between individuals are variously “smooth” or “rough,” depending on the quality of exchange. These are all metaphors based in the physical sensations of touch.19
Critically, unlike Nature-based cultures, settler-colonizer culture all too often seeks to block direct contact with Nature except as a consumer completing a bucket list. Indeed, most of Western “civilization”—housing, clothes, technology, cars, and so on—is driven by the desire and effort to distance humans from direct contact with Nature. Chief Luther Standing Bear (Teton Sioux) describes how touching, being in constant contact with the Earth, was so important for the Lakota people:
The Lakota was a true naturalist—a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, and the attachment grew with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth, and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing. This is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its lifegiving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.20
The centrality of touch shows that we are more than our brains or minds; we are embodied. We build understanding of the world through our bodies. Our bodies are in constant connection with our surroundings, sensing rhythms, smells, tastes, movement, pitch, and timbre. The infant at the breast, in the carer’s arms—or, in the case of aquatics, in the carer’s wake—has a synesthetic experience of smell, taste, sound, touch, and loving affirmation. Breastfeeding facilitates the child’s sense of being cherished by mother (and perhaps others). Physician Margaret Ribble notes that as the result of being “mothered,” a child learns to combine and coordinate suckling with full sensory intake—looking, listening, smelling, and grasping—establishing their first complex behavior.21
With or without breastfeeding, young Mammals need extensive, firm carrying, rocking, and skin-to-skin contact for a well-developing body and brain.22 Ribble notes that “those who are not held in the arms sufficiently, particularly if they are bottle-fed babies, in addition to breathing disturbances often develop gastrointestinal disorders. They become air-swallowers and develop what is popularly known as colic.”23 Babies who experience extensive positive touch and have their needs met, including being carried more, generally have less colic,24 a condition that is uncharacteristic of human ancestry.25 That all-important nerve, the vagus, which innervates all major body systems, is shaped by early-life touch.26 Over time, even touch as expressed through a carer’s voice will affect a child’s vagus nerve regulation.27
Physical experience translates to and conveys emotional experience. What we feel in our bodies imbues our perceptions. Touch is the physical medium for staying connected in the material and emotional world. Whether furred, feathered, scaled, or unadorned, skin is a social organ. Skin is “the oldest and most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector.”28 Just as the infant’s digestive system needs assistance in establishing probiotic bacteria and proper functioning, which is facilitated by ingestion of breast milk, a carer’s touch and affectively attuned responsiveness supports the brain and body systems in developing emotion regulation, including building systems formative to secure attachment.29
Received as vibration, texture, temperature, or pressure, touch begins even before a chick hatches or an infant Mammal is born. Prenatally, the womb, whether eggshell or placenta, provides a constant sensation of being touched and held. Postnatally, babies expect similar levels of feeling from the external world. For altricial species, this means from mother, other primary carers, or community members. Among nomadic foragers, children are touched nearly constantly in early life, being carried and held during naps, first by mother and then half the time by other adults and community members.30 Precocial Birds who are born more or less ready to go out into the unknown on their own are also “prepped” to do so; they are epigenetically “tuned” while encased in their shells. Hatching Parrot chicks hear and are welcomed by the familiar rhythm of their mother’s body and voice. “Rhythm” reminds us that touch is not static.
All Animals are sense-makers, building understandings, an Umwelt, through movement.31 Animals are meant to move,32 which means that species such as humans, who have a limited ability to move as babies, need a carer’s help to gain the somatosensory experience of moving with and against gravity. Infants expect to be held and rocked, facilitating breathing and digestion.33 As a child matures, self-generated movement, which includes play as well as touch, improves nervous system function because it promotes the ability to make predictions and decisions in active, goal-directed movements that fit the environment.34 Modern-day human living, however, has become increasingly sedentary and restricted.
While mandatory car seats, strollers, and carriers may have their place in work-dominated, industrialized, anthropocentric environments, extended periods of inhibited movement and limited carer touch are a radical departure from evolved nest design. One study found that strollers that have a child facing forward are linked to developmental delays.35 Other human cultures consider many practices in the United States, such as isolating children in their own beds and rooms, to be cruel.36 Isolation during night hours is an extremely unusual practice in human history that limits touch and breastfeeding. That practice alone, and its enforcement in early life, can be enough to push children into an emotional or moral detachment that is unseen in cultures that do not separate and isolate young children. Notably, dominant-culture humans are the only humans who intentionally separate mother and child after birth for extended periods of time, despite infant distress.
On the other hand, infants who receive more maternal touch are found to cry less and to have better sleep and behavior organization, heart rate regulation, socioemotional development, and quality attachment.37 At the same time, their mothers experience less stress and depression. In addition, the pair has greater breastfeeding success and better relational quality. In his monumental book Touching, anthropologist Ashley Montagu observed: “When the need for touch remains unsatisfied, abnormal behavior will result.” Children who are not touched enough can become fretful and anxious and sometimes develop an angry disposition. An examination of over four hundred societies found that those that breastfed for at least two and a half years and also kept their young children in arms were more peaceful; that is, they are less likely to have violent conflicts with other societies.38 Such positive touch facilitates effective social bonding during the critical period of life when the brain, particularly the right hemisphere, is rapidly developing.39
An absence of or lapses in early physical touching and rocking by a carer can undermine species-normal brain-body development. The absence of these social interactions early in life affects the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for reactive responses.40 An undertouched baby may develop a sense of perennial threat and fear due to the underdevelopment of systems, like the oxytocin system.41 Touch-activated oxytocin affects development of the brain, cardiovascular system, and immune system, providing the neurohormonal substrate for all social-relational attachment.42 Oxytocin researcher C. Sue Carter notes that “receiving love in early life can influence behavior and physiology across the lifespan.”43 Oxytocin suppression is associated with anxiety, stress, and fear, and it thereby impairs positive social interactions and the development of social bonds.44 In contrast to children who maintained contact with their birth parents, orphaned children who did not receive personal care in the first years of life show depressed levels of oxytocin even when in physical contact with adopted parents.45
Carer touch, preening, grooming, eye-to-eye gaze, caressing, and body-to-body embrace are all involved with temperature regulation and a sense of well-being. A mother’s body temperature, for example, will automatically rise during skin-to-skin contact with an infant whose temperature is too low. After sustained touching, a baby’s temperature will return to normal.46 Touch can play an instrumental role by lowering an infant’s heart rate during a distressing experience.47 Preening, touch, and skin-to-skin contact promote healthy infant sleep cycles, arousal, and exploration levels.48 In contrast, separation and isolation increase dysregulation and can impair the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—a major neuroendocrinal chassis that helps mediate stress—for life.49
Touch and physical stimulation in early life also have a profound effect on lifelong immunity.50 The quality of human caregiving in early life establishes the ratio between the two major cells of the immune system, T helper cells (cd4 surface protein) and T suppressor or cytotoxic cells (cd8 surface protein).51 Helper T cells “help” other cells of the immune system. Cytotoxic T cells kill virally infected cells and tumors. The relationship between T cell ratios and depression (which includes diminished energy and social withdrawal) illustrates the intimate link between the immune system and psychological well-being.52 Individuals with depression often have a decreased ratio of cortisol and epinephrine indicative of poor early care.53 Even at the level of determining which and how certain genes will be expressed phenotypically, touch plays a crucial role.
For a long time, Western scientists asserted that individual personality and temperament, how we each react and regulate our responses and see and interact with the world around us, drew from innate propensities. In this view, a Bear looks and acts like a Bear because of the Bear’s DNA and genetic heritage, and the same is true for an Amazon Parrot, Penguin, or Beaver. Together, the collection of genes makes up a given species’ genome—the rule book contained in every cell for making a Bear a Bear, a human a human, and so forth. Yet in terms of who we each become, something more than passive genetics is involved.
Epigenetic changes occur by mechanisms like chemically tagging DNA—for example, adding on a methyl molecule (three hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom) through a process called methylation, which typically turns a gene off.54 Through epigenetic processes an infant’s brain records developmental experiences (internal triggers and signals) and environmental experiences (carer responses). There are sensitive periods for virtually permanent DNA tagging in early life, carrying a child’s experience forward.55 These “marks” can follow the child throughout life as part of their epigenome56 (in this word, the Greek epi- means “on top” or “above”), which is a record of how DNA sequences are boosted or diminished based on experience.57
Conserved for millions of years, the evolved nest is one of our inheritances beyond genes that influence genetics.58 The state or practices of these extragenetic elements, such as the evolved nest, culture, and ecology, interact to form the kind of person we become. The human lineage maintained the relational dynamics of mother-child love throughout the life span, like trust, tenderness, sensuality, and playfulness. Human cooperation is dependent on this biology of love,59 which varies in its cultural manifestations. This is one way that Nature simultaneously maintains both dazzling diversity and persistent coherence through the dynamic flow of conservation and change.
During the first years of life, maternal touch influences epigenetic mechanisms that shape developing brain circuitries.60 Maternal nurturing (responsiveness, touch, welcoming orientation) in the first months of life is associated with higher functioning of the oxytocin system more than a year later.61 Affectionate touch is part of the “external womb” of exterogestation that is needed after uterogestation.62 As noted, there are sensitive periods for epigenetic DNA tagging in early life, carrying forward the effects of early life adversity.63 Environmental effects, however, are not limited to a child’s direct experience. Not only do epigenetic changes occur in the womb and early in life;64 we can inherit experience-based changes from our ancestors as an epigenetic inheritance.65
In the past, it was assumed that epigenetic changes passed onto offspring would maintain only in the presence of the original environmental trigger and would reverse when the environmental stimulus disappeared. We now know that this assumption is incorrect. Epigenetic change can persist over multiple generations even without continued exposure to the external environmental trigger.66 On both parental sides, epigenetic changes associated with certain physical and psychological diseases, for example, are known to persist for at least four generations.67 Parents increase prenatal infant stress sensitivity or reactivity by transmitting their own experience of stress.68 Repeated or chronic conditions of the mother, such as chronic hunger or social stress, can and do influence embryo development.69 It turns out that most underlying differences in individual brain chemistry result from a combination of genetic inheritance, epigenetic inheritance from both parents and other ancestors, and epigenetic changes affecting an infant from conception on.
These discoveries reveal chilling insights into how modern humans are responsible for both the physical extinction of Wildlife and their psychological extinction, with the loss of species’ internal mental, emotional, and ethical integrity through stress-induced epigenetic changes. Psychological states of trauma can become traits handed down across generations in humans and other Animals.70 In addition to the young Elephants who killed over one hundred Rhinoceroses, other Elephants who have experienced similar trauma both in the wild and in captivity commit intraspecific violence, including infanticide.71 Such unprecedented species-abnormal behaviors are found among other Wildlife. Deer-on-human attacks, for instance, are linked to the Deer “being overly stressed or antagonized.”72 Increasingly, Deer and other Wildlife populations are experiencing psychological trauma and stress caused by multiple factors that have intensified ever since colonization, including increased human interference, land development, and legal and illegal hunts.
One of the most striking examples of human-caused epigenetic inheritance in Wildlife is a second unprecedented change in African Elephants: the rise of tusklessness. During the 1977–1992 civil war in Mozambique, 90 percent of African Elephants in the area were slaughtered by ivory poachers. After this drastic episode, the number of females who grew tusks suddenly dropped. Researchers studying this phenomenon identified genome loci associated with Mammalian tooth development. Among humans, these genes are homologous to those associated with Elephant tusks. Analyses suggest that selective killing for tusks has resulted in epigenetic change and its phenotypic expression of tusklessness.73
The ability of biological systems to become modified by experience allows a species to adjust to naturally varying environments. Epigenetic change is a way for organisms to maintain healthy connection with their dynamic homes. Ideally, an organism’s heritage and epigenetics work together to provide both flexibility and resilience. The social and physical contours of every evolved nest reflect the means and ends to achieve this goal successfully. When the evolved nest is lacking in some way, however, as in the case of the Elephants, health-related epigenetic factors are likely to promote poor mental and physical health. A species’ changes become maladaptive, meaning that, as in the case of Elephants, adaptations to conditions radically different from those in which their nests evolved are harmful. In any species, PTSD is a natural response to unnatural conditions.
Overall, touch is how we become fully and intelligently embodied. Carer touch promotes our well-being, epigenetically protecting us and promoting our resilience.74 Touch is a way we express our innate, underlying oneness with the world through a material medium. With loving touch, we welcome the world that welcomes us, assured of our unbroken connection with all of Nature and the cosmos.