Face-touching may reflect unconscious hand-smelling [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Face-touching may reflect unconscious hand-smelling [pdf]

royalsocietypublishing.org

70 pointssturza31 comments

Related: growing up, one of the things that my sister and I would joke about was the extent to which we both would both unconsciously smell our wrists and lower arm areas while doing math. We would catch each other all the time doing it and it was hilarious. Here is an example of what I am talking about:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/03/24/business/24artifi...

As a completely uninformed guess, I think the link between focus and smelling one's hand/wrist might have something to do with early feelings of comfort as an infant associated with the smell of a parent's skin. The idea being that introducing a close approximation of that smell would remove any distraction brought on by other, less familiar smells, and increase focus.

This must be why beard stroking is effective.

I wonder whether makeup influences the frequency or location of face touches. I wear glasses/contacts and I’ve noticed I rub my eyes fairly often during my (recently makeup-free) work day but I definitely don’t when I’m wearing mascara or false lashes.

I am the same but maybe because we've learnt over time that touching our makeup smudges it? In which case, perhaps it's a good idea to wear a lot these coming weeks!

I've been wondering what counts as touching your face for purposes of virus transmission.

In the paper they highlight people whose fingers are under or in their noses but I wonder if something like grazing your cheek or forehead would count. Is there some mechanism the virus would use to migrate from the forehead/cheek into the eyes/nose or is the "don't touch your face" advice really shorthand for "don't pick your nose or rub your eyes"?

EDIT: Yes. Personally, I would not risk it if it lowers my chance of getting infected. The choice is up to you.

> These pathogens can be picked up by our hands and get into the body through mucous membranes on the face — eyes, nose, and mouth — that act as pathways to the throat and lungs.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/how-touching-your-face-c...

>Is there some mechanism the virus would use to migrate from the forehead/cheek into the eyes/nose

i'm not a doctor/virologist/biologist/whatever, but one could imagine someones' perspiring face may aerosolize whatever was on its' surface due to the evaporative cooling effect.

I don't know whether or not that's practically feasible.

Very interesting topic. I've noticed that whenever I wear my favorite perfume on my beard, I'll spend the following 4 hours touching my hands to remember good memories attached to that smell.

For people looking into the effect of self-face-touching with virus spreading,

"We note that this behaviour offace-touching may be responsible for transferring nearly 25%of respiratory illness."

I know how the wooden beams in my office smell. My mind can summon the smell of the handrails in the train station, disturbingly. The smell of my clothes, and crotch, before and after workout, it's right there. It takes me a while to accept clothes I got from other people as my own. Using strangers' detergent alienates me from my own clothes.

I don't like to touch things I know other people touch. (It's a weak effect, and doesn't bother me.) Is this related to smell? Do I not like getting other people's smell on my hands? Or is it just hygiene training? Hard to tell. If you were to count, I'd be smelling my hands a lot less when riding a bicycle not my own. Judging by that study.

It's interesting how the authors speculate about the link between self-smelling and consciousness. I am who I smell.

Odd. I touch my face almost compulsively, but I have an extremely poor sense of smell. I smell my hands right now, I can't tell what they smell like at all.

Self-smelling could be a mechanism for figuring out self-smell for the purposes of not getting confused by it when trying to distinguish environmental sources. In which case it would be perfectly reasonable to not smell 'anything' when actively smelling oneself.

Looks like the question really driving this paper is "why are humans touching their faces so much [and spreading viruses]?"

Lost me on this: "We then detail evidence from the one study that implicated an olfactory origin for this behaviour:"...

One. Okay. Helps explain 'may reflect'...

Add [pdf] to title due to auto-download

Weird verb choice, subserves. I would have used effects or facilitates.

We've put a different, less subservient phrase from the article in the title above.

The submitted title was "A hypothesis that self-face-touching subserves self-smelling", which I assume was an admirable attempt to make the title less baity by using representative language from the text.

I am a native English speaker who graduated with a 3.8 GPA in History from a world Top 30 university.

I still had to use a dictionary to understand what "subserves" means in this context.

Our language is so hilariously broken with all of the "aliasing" that is used by people who want to make themselves sound smarter.

What we should do instead is try to make sure other people can understand what we are trying to say.

I'm another native speaker who graduated high school more by dint of luck and pity than for any other reason, and then went to work instead of college. Between the context and the similarity with the adjective "subservient", "subserves" proved trivial to parse, and I haven't yet been able to come up with another expression of the same concept that is also as concise. In any case, it seems unlikely that educational attainment is all that useful an indicator here.

In general writing, your point has merit. In the title of an academic paper published in a journal of philosophy, I don't know that the strictures and desiderata of general writing wholly apply.

“subserves” -> “is for” could fit

I'd have gone with "supports", maybe, but the connotation is different; "subserves" says self-smelling is a major purpose of self-face-touching, "supports" suggests the association may be coincidental. Since the paper's claim appears to be the former, it makes sense to use the stronger word in the title, too.

"A hypothesis that if one touches their face, they are more likely to smell themselves as well"

is an infinitely clearer title, in my opinion.

If your goal is for only 5 people to understand you and think you are cool, then it's no surprise why we have academic titles like

"Embodied intersectionality and the intersectional management of hotel labour: the everyday experiences of social differentiation in customer‐oriented work"

The purpose of academic publication is to communicate with others in the same field, where the terminology of art is shared among all. Not having acquainted yourself with a given field's specific lexicon, why would you expect to understand without effort the meaning of titles that make heavy use of it?

For that matter, not being a participant in the work of which these publications constitute a part, why insist that those who do participate in it to talk with one another in the same language they'd use to make their work understandable to a lay audience such as yourself?

None of this seems very reasonable to me. You've done a splendid job of making clear that you value your own opinion in such matters quite highly, but you've left much to be desired in explaining why anyone else should do the same.

Maybe this behavior is bit more sophisticated version of what dogs to when meet. Dogs like push their nose comfortably in areas we generally prefer to hide from strangers, when they like the smell a good chance this is rewarded with a doggy style session.

I sometimes think we have made the persuasion game so complicated and we could be a lot happier if everybody starts having 10x more sex tomorrow.

> we could be a lot happier if everybody starts having 10x more sex tomorrow.

If we ignore all the caveats (most obviously disease, emotional issues, and pregnancy), surely that's a foregone conclusion?

https://xkcd.com/592/

Fallacy of Chesterton's Fence: Don”t demolish things (including social norms) until you understand why they arose in the first place. Most likely somebody solved a problem you no longer perceive because the solution is currently in place and blocking its manifestation. Sure, the problems might be antiquated cruft that is no longer relevant and no longer serves a purpose... but it might not.

Let's for simplicity apply Occam's razor:

When we didn't have modern birth control solutions cultural rituals were an effective measure against women giving birth to seven children from different men.

We removed that natural health taxing consequence of having sex. Could you elaborate on your fence a bit because I'm always curious about unknown unknowns to me.

I haven’t stated an opinion on the matter, I’m just cautioning against these offhanded remarks about massive societal re-engineering.

Though your example is telling, actually. Humans are fairly unusual insofar as females do not have significant observable markers of being fertile or not (in the animal example, “in heat”). So you’d really have to go back and look at why evolution selected for this particular characteristic and what its consequences were, how it influenced sexual norms, and only then layer on the consideration you make about contraception.

And yes, this is vastly contentious, and no, we are not going to solve it in the footnotes of a tech-centric forum. But my message was intended to be more general.

Fair enough. My point was coming more from the view that we still treat women like second class people.

600 million women were married before they reached 18. 200 million women have experience genital mutilation so I think it fair to say in most cultures the accepted behavior of women is severely restricted in every possible way.

The women I met have all surprised me with a daily desire for sex activity. Many of them have had slut shaming experiences while growing up.

Again, a bit of a sweeping (and false) perception informed by our local historical and cultural context. There is strong anthropological evidence that for dozens of millennia matriarchal societies were the norm. This survived well into the pre-colonial era in Africa. It just appears that way because patriarchal structures have dominated for most of the recent past (~4000-5000 years), and because this period coincides with the historical record... again, is this a quirk or a consequence, and in the latter case, which way does causation flow?

We have no written records about the period you mention so I cannot imagine how strong this evidence is. Africa's population is for the majority practicing the Islam since a millennium before the colonial era, and that's a religion with a classical patriarchal society structure.

While I have been very charitable in my interpretation of your arguments. You keep using straw man arguments in our discussion again and again.

You literally shift the goal post with every comment you make, I think this is an inferior way of discourse.

I have seen comments in the past that were a lot more impressive, expressing thoughts of deep thinking. This has not been your best work and decide not to engage anymore with you on this topic.

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