The Seventh Sense: Humans Can Touch Things Before Touching Them

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You reach into your backpack looking for your phone. You can't see it, but somehow your fingers find it before you actually touch it. You feel where it is, even through the clutter.

You walk barefoot on the beach, and somehow your toes detect shells buried beneath the sand before you step on them.

You drag your finger through loose dirt to find a buried toy, and you sense it's there a split second before contact.

These aren't accidents or lucky guesses. According to groundbreaking research published in November 2025, humans possess a previously undocumented sensory ability called "remote touch," the ability to detect objects without direct physical contact.

It's being called our "seventh sense."

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and University College London tested human participants against robotic sensors in a simple task: drag your finger through sand and detect a buried cube before touching it. The humans achieved an impressive 70.7% accuracy. They could sense the object coming before their skin made contact.

"It's the first time that remote touch has been studied in humans," said Dr. Elisabetta Versace, Senior Lecturer in Psychology who designed the study, "and it changes our conception of the perceptual world in living beings, including humans."

We share this ability with shorebirds like sandpipers and plovers, which use remote touch to find prey buried in sand. But unlike birds with specialized beaks designed for this purpose, humans have this sense despite having no obvious anatomical structures for it.

We didn't know we had it. We've been using it our whole lives without realizing it. And understanding it could revolutionize everything from prosthetics to planetary exploration.

The Five (or Six, or Seven) Senses

Let's start with what we thought we knew about human senses.

Everyone learns about the five basic senses in elementary school:

Sight (vision)
Hearing (audition)
Taste (gustation)
Smell (olfaction)
Touch (tactile sensation)

But scientists have long known there are more than five. The most widely accepted "sixth sense" is proprioception, your body's ability to sense where your limbs are in space without looking. Close your eyes and touch your nose with your finger. You can do that because of proprioception. It's how you know your arm is bent or straight, how you walk without watching your feet, how you catch a ball.

Beyond proprioception, scientists have identified other sensory systems:

Equilibrioception (balance, sensed by your inner ear)
Thermoception (detecting temperature)
Nociception (sensing pain)
Interoception (sensing internal body states like hunger, thirst, heartbeat)

So we have way more than five senses. Some scientists count as many as 20+ distinct sensory systems.

But "remote touch" is different. It's not a new sensory organ or receptor. It's an extension of our sense of touch that reaches beyond direct contact, allowing us to feel things we're not actually touching yet.

And we never knew we had it.

The Experiment: Can Humans Sense Through Sand?

The research team, led by Dr. Elisabetta Versace at Queen Mary University and Professor Lorenzo Jamone at University College London, designed a simple but revealing experiment.

The Human Test

Participants sat in front of a box filled with sand. Buried somewhere in that sand, at varying distances from 1 to 7 centimeters deep, was a small cube.

The task: slowly drag your finger through the sand in a straight line. When you think there's an object ahead (but before you actually touch it), press a button. An LED strip guided participants along the correct path so they wouldn't accidentally miss the cube. They completed multiple trials, including control trials where no cube was buried (to test for false positives).

The question: Can humans genuinely detect the cube before making direct contact? Or are they just guessing?

The Results: Humans Have Remote Touch

The answer was clear: humans can genuinely sense objects buried in granular materials before touching them.

Human performance:

70.7% precision in detecting the object within the expected range
Average detection distance: 5.6 centimeters before contact
Median detection: 5 centimeters before contact
Very few false positives (pressing the button when no object was there)

This isn't random guessing. If people were guessing, accuracy would be around 50%. At 70.7%, humans are demonstrably detecting something real.

The Robot Challenge

To verify that this was a genuine sensory ability (not just lucky guessing or some other explanation), the team built a robotic counterpart.

A UR5 robotic arm was equipped with a custom fingertip containing four sensors measuring forces in three directions. The fingertip was the same size as a human finger and moved through sand at the same speed as human participants. The robot was trained using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) machine learning algorithm, analyzing pressure and vibration patterns to detect buried objects.

Robot performance:

40% overall precision (much lower than humans)
Detected objects from slightly farther distances (average 7.1 cm, median 6 cm)
Produced many false positives (detecting objects that weren't there)

Surprisingly, humans outperformed the robot by about 30%. While the robot had better range, it was far less accurate.

"What makes this research especially exciting is how the human and robotic studies informed each other," said Lorenzo Jamone. "The human experiments guided the robot's learning approach, and the robot's performance provided new perspectives for interpreting the human data."

How Does Remote Touch Work?

So how can humans detect objects they're not touching? The answer lies in how pressure travels through granular materials like sand.

The Physics of Granular Materials

When you drag your finger through sand, you're creating a moving pressure wave. Sand particles transmit this pressure to neighboring particles in a complex web of micro-collisions.

When there's a solid object buried in the sand, it interrupts this pattern. The object creates:

Pressure changes: The buried object resists compression differently than sand does, creating subtle changes in how pressure distributes through the surrounding grains.
Vibrations: The object causes different vibration patterns as sand particles collide with it versus with each other.
Force distribution: The presence of the object changes how forces flow through the granular medium.

These changes propagate back through the sand to your finger, arriving before your skin actually contacts the object.

Your mechanoreceptors (touch sensors in your skin) are incredibly sensitive. They can detect:

Forces as small as 0.02 grams
Vibrations at frequencies from 5 to 1000 Hz
Pressure changes at resolutions measured in microns

This sensitivity allows you to feel the altered pressure patterns caused by a buried object centimeters away.

Why It Works Better in Granular Materials

This only works in materials where pressure can transmit particle-to-particle before you make direct contact. It works in:

Sand
Dirt
Gravel
Rice
Sugar
Any loose, granular substance

It doesn't work in:

Water (particles move too freely, pressure dissipates)
Solid surfaces (you need direct contact)
Air (not dense enough)

The granular medium acts like a mechanical transmission system, carrying information about buried objects back to your finger.

Shorebirds: The Masters of Remote Touch

Humans might have remote touch, but we're amateurs compared to certain birds. Sandpipers, plovers, sanderlings, and other shorebirds depend on remote touch for survival. They probe wet sand with their beaks, detecting tiny prey (worms, mollusks, crustaceans) buried centimeters below the surface.

These birds have specialized adaptations:

Herbst corpuscles: Specialized mechanoreceptors at the tip of their beaks that are exquisitely sensitive to pressure and vibration
Beak structure: Flexible, probe-like beaks designed to penetrate sand without visual guidance
Neural processing: Brain regions dedicated to interpreting tactile signals from the beak

Studies show these birds can detect a 2mm worm buried 2-3 centimeters deep in wet sand. They do this while running along the beach at high speed, probing dozens of times per minute. Remarkably, humans achieve similar detection capabilities (5-6 centimeters) despite lacking any specialized anatomy for the task. We're using general-purpose mechanoreceptors in our fingertips, not specialized bird-beak sensors, and we still detect buried objects reliably.

This suggests remote touch might be a fundamental property of how touch works in granular media, not requiring specialized evolution.

Why We Never Noticed This Before

If we've had remote touch all along, why are we only discovering it now in 2025?

Several reasons:

1. We don't encounter the right conditions often: Remote touch only works in granular materials. Most of our daily tactile experiences involve solid surfaces where remote touch doesn't apply.

2. It's subtle: The sensation is faint. We might feel something but not consciously recognize it as distinct from regular touch.

3. We conflate it with other senses: When you're reaching into your backpack and sense your phone before touching it, you might attribute that to memory, spatial reasoning, or luck rather than recognizing it as a sensory ability.

4. It wasn't scientifically studied: Until researchers specifically tested whether humans could detect buried objects through granular media before contact, nobody had systematically documented the ability.

5. It's overshadowed by vision: In most situations, we use our eyes. We don't need remote touch because we can see.

Only in situations where vision is blocked (reaching into bags, walking barefoot on beaches, searching through piles) does remote touch become useful.

Real-World Applications: Why This Matters

Understanding remote touch has practical implications across multiple fields:

1. Prosthetics and Assistive Technology

People with prosthetic limbs often lose not just movement but sensation. Current prosthetics are "numb." Users can't feel what their artificial hand is touching. Researchers are working to create sensory feedback systems that restore touch to prosthetic devices. Understanding remote touch could inform these designs:

Sensors that detect objects before gripping them
Feedback systems that give users advance warning of contact
More intuitive prosthetics that "feel" more natural

"The discovery opens possibilities for designing tools and assistive technologies that extend human tactile perception," said Zhengqi Chen, a PhD student in robotics at Queen Mary University.

2. Robotics

Current robots struggle with delicate manipulation tasks because they lack sophisticated touch sensing. They often grip too hard (crushing objects) or too soft (dropping them).

Robots with remote touch capabilities could:

Detect objects before contact (preventing damage)
Navigate granular terrain (sand, gravel, rubble) more effectively
Perform delicate archaeological excavation without damaging artifacts
Conduct search-and-rescue operations in collapsed buildings where vision is blocked

The research comparing human and robot performance provides valuable benchmarks. Engineers now know what level of sensitivity to aim for when designing robotic tactile systems.

3. Space and Underwater Exploration

Many environments lack clear visibility: Martian soil, ocean floors, underground caves, disaster sites.

"These insights could inform the development of advanced robots capable of delicate operations, for example locating archaeological artifacts without damage, or exploring sandy or granular terrains such as Martian soil or ocean floors," Chen explained.

A Mars rover with remote touch could:

Detect buried rocks or artifacts before its wheels hit them
Sense subsurface ice or water
Identify buried geological samples worth collecting

Underwater robots exploring sandy or silty ocean floors could use remote touch to find objects when visibility is zero.

4. Agriculture and Food Processing

Machines that sort, handle, or harvest delicate fruits and vegetables could benefit from remote touch, detecting ripeness, firmness, or internal damage before gripping.

5. Medical Devices

Surgeons performing minimally invasive procedures through small incisions have limited tactile feedback. Surgical robots with enhanced remote touch could improve precision and safety.

6. Safety Systems

Construction equipment working with granular materials (excavators, bulldozers) could use remote touch sensors to detect buried utilities, objects, or even people before making contact.

What's Next: Future Research

This is just the beginning. Researchers have many questions:

How far can remote touch reach? The study tested distances up to 7 centimeters, but is that the limit? Could highly trained individuals extend this range?

Can it be trained and improved? With practice, could people become more sensitive to remote touch? Could specialized training enhance this ability?

What about other materials? The study used sand. How does remote touch work in gravel, soil, rice, snow, or other granular media?

What neural mechanisms are involved? Which parts of the brain process remote touch? Is it distinct from regular touch processing, or just an extension of existing tactile systems?

Does it vary between individuals? Are some people naturally better at remote touch? Do factors like age, hand dexterity, or sensory sensitivity affect the ability?

Can we create enhanced remote touch? Could wearable devices amplify our natural remote touch ability, allowing us to sense buried objects from even farther away?

The Bigger Picture: Expanding Our Understanding of Touch

This discovery challenges the traditional view of touch as a "proximal sense," limited to direct contact. "It changes our conception of the perceptual world (what is called the 'receptive field') in living beings, including humans," Dr. Versace emphasized.

Touch isn't as short-range as we thought. Under the right conditions (granular media), touch can reach beyond your skin, sensing objects centimeters away. This raises philosophical questions: Where does your sense of touch end? Is the boundary of your sensory experience at your skin? Or does it extend into the materials you're interacting with?

It also suggests we might have other sensory abilities we haven't recognized yet. If we've had remote touch all along without knowing it, what else might we be sensing unconsciously?

The Bottom Line

Humans possess a "seventh sense" called remote touch, the ability to detect objects buried in granular materials before making direct physical contact. Research published in November 2025 by Queen Mary University of London and University College London demonstrated that people can sense a buried cube 5-6 centimeters away through sand, achieving 70.7% accuracy. This ability works through mechanoreceptors in the fingertips detecting subtle pressure changes and vibrations transmitted through granular materials when a buried object interrupts the normal pressure distribution pattern.

We share this sense with shorebirds like sandpipers and plovers, which use remote touch to find buried prey, though they have specialized anatomical structures while humans achieve similar results with general-purpose touch receptors.

Applications include:

Improved prosthetic limbs with advance-contact sensing
Better robots for delicate manipulation and granular terrain exploration
Space and underwater exploration in low-visibility environments
Agricultural and medical devices with enhanced tactile sensitivity

We've had remote touch all along but never recognized it as a distinct sensory ability because it's subtle, only works in specific conditions, and is usually overshadowed by vision.

The next time you reach into your bag and your fingers find your phone before touching it, or you walk barefoot on sand and somehow avoid stepping on sharp shells, remember: that's not luck. That's not guessing. That's your seventh sense. Remote touch. A hidden ability you never knew you had, extending your sense of touch beyond your skin and into the world around you.

Turns out, we can touch things before we touch them. We just never realized it until now.

Sources

Chen, Z., Jamone, L., & Versace, E. (2025). Humans and robots exhibit comparable tactile sensitivity in detecting buried objects through granular media. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL).

IFLScience. (2025). Newly Discovered "Seventh Sense" In Humans Is Called Remote Touch. Retrieved from https://www.iflscience.com/humans-have-a-seventh-sense-that-lets-you-touch-things-from-a-distance-81516

Queen Mary University of London. (2025). Research first to show humans have remote touch "seventh sense" like sandpipers. Retrieved from https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2025/science-and-engineering/se/research-first-to-show-humans-have-remote-touch-seventh-sense-like-sandpipers.html

SciTechDaily. (2025). New Research Reveals Humans Have a Remote Touch "Seventh Sense". Retrieved from https://scitechdaily.com/new-research-reveals-humans-have-a-remote-touch-seventh-sense/

The Debrief. (2025). New Research Reveals Humans Have a Hidden "Seventh Sense" of Remote Touch. Retrieved from https://thedebrief.org/new-research-reveals-humans-have-a-hidden-seventh-sense-of-remote-touch/

Upworthy. (2025). First-of-its-kind study reveals a potential 'seventh sense' in humans: Remote touch. Retrieved from https://www.upworthy.com/seventh-sense-remote-touch

Yahoo News. (2025). Humans possess a 'seventh sense' called remote touch, study finds. Retrieved from https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/humans-possess-seventh-sense-called-125100095.html