Scientists from Queen Mary University of London and University College London have found evidence that humans may possess a previously overlooked sensory ability that allows us to detect objects before physically touching them, a phenomenon researchers are calling “remote touch.”
Touch has traditionally been viewed as a short range sense that only works through direct contact. You feel something because it presses against your skin. But observations in the animal world have hinted that this might not always be the full story, according to the newly published study. Certain shorebirds, for example, can locate prey hidden under sand by sensing tiny mechanical disturbances in the grains around it, effectively detecting food without actually touching it.
Curious whether humans might share something similar, the research team designed a simple but revealing experiment. Volunteers were asked to rake their fingers gently through sand to find a buried cube. The goal was to see if they could sense the object’s presence before their fingers made contact.
Surprisingly, many participants could.
The data showed that people consistently detected subtle changes in resistance and pressure in the sand caused by the hidden object. In other words, their hands picked up minute mechanical signals traveling through the granular material. Participants achieved about 70.7 percent precision within the expected detectable range, suggesting this was not random guessing.
Overview of the experiment setup for tactile detection in granular media. (a) Human experiment setup, showing a participant finger raking through a sand-filled box with an LED strip guiding the trajectory and buried cube at fixed locations. (b) Robotic experiment setup, featuring a UR5 arm with a tactile sensor and a buried cube in sand. (c) Schematic of the raking process. Credit: Queen Mary University of London
To better understand what was happening, researchers modeled the physics of how forces move through sand. They discovered that the human hand is far more sensitive than previously assumed, capable of perceiving extremely small shifts in movement and pressure. The sensitivity came close to the theoretical physical limits for detecting these kinds of mechanical reflections.
The team also compared humans to a robotic tactile sensor trained with an artificial intelligence model. Interestingly, the robot could sometimes sense objects from slightly farther away, but it generated many false alarms and ended up with only about 40 percent precision overall. Humans, despite lacking specialized biological structures like birds, proved more reliable.
Beyond being a scientific curiosity, the findings could have practical uses. Engineers could use human touch as a benchmark to design better robotic systems for tasks like search and rescue, archaeology, or exploring environments where vision is limited, such as underwater or on other planets.
The study challenges a basic assumption about how we experience the world. Touch may not stop at the skin after all. It might extend just a little further than we ever realized.