What Happens When You Touch Wood
Imagine being on fire and flayed alive...
Summer Series: Episode Touch
Imagine you’re on fire.
Not metaphorically, like when you’re ‘on fire’ after two espressos.
Fully on fire, like a volcano or a candle.
I know, right? — bad day.
But just when you think the worst is over, a man with a knife and a big beard comes along and skins you alive.
Not many humans are coming back from that.
But there’s a tree in Crystal Palace Park that LIVES for this kind of abuse.
Do you know which?
Welcome to the second episode of my Summer series, this week on the superpower of touch.
(The first episode on Summer Sight is here — go read it, it’s totally fine!)
OMG: There’s a mammal that can FEEL different textures down to 10 NANOMETRES — it’s YOU
To get an idea of how freakin’ awesome that is, here are some other things that are 10 nanometres in size:
4 or 5 strands of DNA.
1 antibody in your immune system.
The membrane wall of just ONE of the 200 million cells in your eye.
If they were laid out on a perfectly smooth surface, you could detect the difference between one antibody protein and two.
For reference, you have QUADRILLIONS of antibodies inside you right now.
If you’re still struggling with getting this (I know I am), try this analogy from one of the study’s authors:
If your finger was the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses [and] cars.
What the actual heck. Human touch is unbelievably sensitive.
So let’s use it, shall we?
Your Turn: Touch Wood
This is the cork of the cork oak — the tree to which I alluded in the intro. (Did you guess right?)
Its waterproof, fireproof, bubble wrap bark insulates the tree from forest fires, drought and insect attacks (but not from winemakers or the manufacturers of cricket balls).
Not only that, but the cork oak’s miracle skin can fully regenerate even after humans strip its bark for their bottles.
To my touch, the cork of this (unharvested) cork oak is rough, almost prickly, but soft to a fingernail.
It feels utterly unique — but so do the barks of the yew, bay, birch, cedar and oak that are its neighbours in this woodland wonderland.
Bark is not just protection; it’s variation. The bark is a record of how each tree meets the world: sinuous, smooth, flakey, scaled, ridged.
The range of textures is a feast for my fingertips.
And so this episode’s therapeutic practice is simple:
Go into your local park or woodland.
Touch — and really feel — as many different varieties of bark as you can.
Make sure you put skin to bark for at least 90 seconds each time.
Report back :)
p.s. If you want to start identifying your trees from their bark alone, try this excellent mini guide from Tree Guide UK.
How Does It Work? (The Sciencey Bit)
A 2017 Japanese study found that touching bare wood (white oak in this case) ‘calms prefrontal cortex activity and induces parasympathetic nervous activity more than other materials [stainless steel, marble and tile], thereby inducing physiological relaxation.’
I hearby give you permission to have a bit more fun than the 18 study participants:
If it works in the lab, you’d hope it’d be a dash more effective in the park. Bonus points if you want to go barefoot.
Go Deeper
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If you want to go deeper, I am in the process of putting together an 8-session therapeutic nature connection programme that will run in September and October in Southeast London.
Reply if you’d like to hear more.
‘Uplifting, peaceful, calming and restorative.’ — Gry
diwyc,
dc
Ah, St.Bartholomew - such a confusing portrayal. A man who is clearly alive and in possession of his own skin, holding his own skin, which has been flayed off. And he is bearded...underneath his skin?
Then again, painting a genuinely flayed skinless man on the wall of the Sistine Chapel might have been thought of as a bit much... If it wasn't for the fact that the whole wall is covered in half naked bodybuilders, half naked bodybuilders with boobs - which seems to be how Michelangelo understood women - and a guy having his dick bitten off by a snake.
Sorry, where were we? Oh yes. Trees. Cork. Lovely stuff. Can't get enough of it. Greetings and benedictions to you
Fabulous! Coincidentally, I started yesterday on my first tree drawing in ages, trying to capture the patterns in the bark of an oak tree. Extra-coincidentally, minutes before reading this post I read (in the book "In Search of Now - the science and mystery of the present moment") that "when we move our fingers across a surface, the feeling of texture – the roughness of tree bark or subtle furriness of velvet – comes from nerves in the skin being stimulated at intervals of 1-2 milliseconds" (for context, this is in a discussion about how, in most contexts, we cannot distinguish any time difference between signals less than ~40 milliseconds apart).