Blind artist Eriko Watanabe uses touch to see her surroundings.
Credit: Alan Lee

Touch, expressive and intuitive. Complex in design and function. Essential to our very development. No other sense does more to define us than the sense of touch. And yet most of us move through life, completely unaware of the myriad ways we use it, not only to feel the world, but to move within.

In The Science of the Senses: Touch we will take a journey through the skin, into the subcutaneous world of our sensory receptors and up into the brain as we explore the hidden language of our most essential sense.

Ian Waterman picks up an egg, even though he can't feel it.
Credit: Lank Beach Productions

Along the way we will meet Ian Waterman, a man who has lost his sense of touch and developed some amazing strategies to compensate for his loss. We'll visit a blind artist whose astonishing drawings demonstrate the power we may all possess to visualise the world by feeling it. And we'll discover what a race car driver and a surgeon have in common when it comes to utilizing this extraordinary sense and why a revolutionary new prosthetic, one which taps into the amazing power of the human brain, may one day restore the sense of touch to amputees.

Visit our photogallery to learn more about this program.