This year’s Ig Nobel Peach Prize was jointly awarded to: Ghada A. bin Saif, Alexandru Papoiu, Liliana Banari, Francis McGlone, Shawn G. Kwatra, Yiong-Huak Chan, and Gil Yosipovitch, for trying to measure the pleasurability of scratching an itch. The researchers represent the UK, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the USA. REFERENCE: Read more…
Poppy Sebag-Montefiore lived in China for five years between 1999 and 2007. She worked in the BBC’s Beijing Bureau as a news producer and a culture and arts reporter. In this article published in the most recent issue of Granta (#146 – The Politics of Feeling), Poppy reflects on touch, Read more…
Since its launch in January 2018, Dr. Ranjan Chatterjee’s ‘Feel Better, Live More’ podcast has grown rapidly to become the Number 1 health podcast in the UK. It regularly tops the iTunes charts, has been downloaded over 2 million times. The latest episode (#45), released on 16/01/2019, features SomAffect’s Francis Read more…
Just published, and already making headlines, is our new open-access paper in Current Biology. SomAffect’s Francis McGlone and Susannah Walker (LJMU) have been working closely in collaboration with Rebecca Slater’s lab (University of Oxford) on this study which shows that stroking touch reduces infant neural (EEG) responses to pinpricks & clinical Read more…
In November 2017, the pharmaceutical company Roche hosted NeuroSense, an event that aimed to “explore the way the brain uses the five senses to understand the world” – as part of their “Future-proofing Healthcare” series. (More details here: https://somaffect.org/2017/11/future-proofing-healthcare-neurosense-2nd-november-free-event/ ) SomAffect’s Professor Francis McGlone was among the speakers invited Read more…
The Autumn 2017 edition of the BNA Bulletin (free to all British Neuroscience Association Members!) which has just landed on the doormats, in-trays and inboxes of over 2000 people features a 2 page article on C-Tactile fibres, touch, and the work of SomAffect / LJMU Professor Francis McGlone. … “The Read more…
Melanie Reid MBE is an award-winning Times journalist whose weekly column for The Times, ‘Spinal Column’, is about disability and her life as a disabled person – Melanie is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident. On November 25 2017, she wrote a column on the benefits Read more…
SomAffect’s research with collaborators into gentle touch in premature infants has been featured in an article by the NewScientist by Linda Geddes. While many premature babies experience pain, McGlone thinks that it is exposure to gentle touch that really matters. There’s mounting evidence that a set of nerves called c-tactile Read more…
LJMU Neuroscience Professor Francis McGlone discusses the importance & role of “touch” in schools on BBC One Breakfast, a national morning news programme. [19th February 2017]
CT afferents are receptors in mammalian hairy skin that fire action potentials when the skin is touched lightly which makes them particularly important in affective touch. Traditionally neuroscientific research has focused on more discriminative and haptic properties of touch that are mediated by large myelinated afferents and the coding properties and functional organization of unmyelinated CT afferents have been studied much less. The proposed volume will draw together existing knowledge in this nascent field. Separate sections will address (1) how we can measure affective touch, (2) CT structure and physiology, (3) CT processing, (4) the contribution of CTs to sexual behavior, (5) clinical relevance, (6) commercial relevance, and (7) future research considerations. (more…)