Touch Response
"Most people have about 100,000 hair follicles on their head, and lose between fifty and a hundred hairs a day through normal combing, brushing, or fussing" (Ackerman).*
A common icon of frustration is pulling one's hair out. Even seeing someone else pull at their hair instills the same feeling within us. We empathize with the negative emotions present in the moment. Perhaps we want to get something off our chests but have no safe space to do so, or it is the only way our emotions can manifest without great damage to ourselves or others. It is often that problems exist only in our minds, in our heads, that we get too upset to hold it in any longer. With so many nerves connecting the hair follicles to our scalp, it is understandable that any movement, tug, or brush will be felt extremely sensitively.
"A hand moves with a complex precision that’s irreplaceable, feels with a delicate intuition that’s indefinable, as designers of robotic hands are discovering. Because we use our hands so often for so many purposes, flexing, bending, gripping, pointing, stretching them millions of times, University of Utah Research Institute engineers have invented a glove to wear over a hand that has lost the sense of touch—through the use of electronics and sound waves, it gives the wearer a sense of pressure, which is essential to being able to grasp" (Ackerman).
The intricate ways that a hand moves includes the creation of music. Though sound is not a part of the touch chapter, there is an undeniable connection between the hands of musicians and that which they touch. The contact of callused fingertips on worn silver strings is to unleash a power held deep inside oneself, sharing the skills of a practiced craft. This photograph focuses on the fingers as they press deeply into the strings of a violin, applying great pressure to ensure a quality sound as if it were being played in a performance.
*I used an online version of the book which did not display page numbers.
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