The Background - Artificial Human Sensors: Science and Applications - page 5

exploring behaviours. For example, when purchasing a peach in the food mart,
the visual and olfaction senses are as important as to get the textural impression
as touching the soft surface, maybe with the more sensitive outer part of the hand.
Professionals often use the technique by using the outer and often hairy part of
the hand, when detecting a presence of airflow, e.g., air flow leakage in a house.
The same principle is used by the hair-bearing cells attached in the bat's wings,
i.e., a function to detect the airflow on the wing surface. Otherwise, the advanced
capability to externally recognise from, texture and temperature primarily by the
hands is a helpful perceptual quality tool.
The role of the hair in relation to the skin sensing ability is obvious, but the
hair can also be used in another dimension. The raising of the hair of the skin, i.e.,
piloerection is used in different occasions when feeling angry, frightened or thrilled
and aim to communicate a state of looking larger and hopefully more threatening.
Humans may in these situations feel this function when the hair rises on the arms.
The communication and social belongings by touch is a necessity, but in many
cultures kept to a minimum, which may have negative effects. The touch between
a mother and infant is well-known, generally recognised and accepted. However,
the socially based skin contacts between older people often exhibit a completely
lack of touch from other humans. The sensation of the skin has different zones of
more or less dense nerve cells networks used to communicate their identity, social
status and their sexual desirability. This is different in cultures where the skin
is naked and shown to others. On the other hand, the people in geographically
cooler areas are probably suffering from this perceptual ability, when most of the
time they have to hide their skin from freezing by wearing warm clothes. This
measure, which also prevents additional sun rays from reaching the skin, i.e., lack
of the sun reaching the skin prevent important sun related vitamin D formation,
as well as may cause depression. This phenomenon can be experienced during
wintertime in areas where the absence of the sun is obvious during certain parts of
the year, e.g., northern Europe.
Geographical factors can be predicted to have a major influence on the use of
our biggest perceptual sensing organ, i.e., by sheltering the tactile sensing ability
of the skin, will actually prevent whole populations to experience the full flavour
of this sense. This restriction will most likely affect the tactile ability in a num-
ber of functions, social contacts, sexuality and emotions. In general, the restric-
tion of using the skin capability in features like experience impressions from the
environment, for example, electrical lightning, pressure change at a concert caused
by the huge loud speakers or wind flow on top of the mountain. The preven-
tion of environmental properties from contact with the skin will seriously affect
the human perception and by that means also limit the power to receive optimal
impressions.
It may not be too controversial to assume that the tactile perceptual organ
is differently used in different climate zones and therefore will exhibit serious
impacts on the perception in general and specifically the tactile sensing capability.
What this means in the individual's personality, cultural or social affiliation is quite