The sensation of touch is produced by one of the most complex systems in the human body. Current neuroscience research estimates that the human hand alone contains roughly 17,000 mechanoreceptors—bundles of cells, nerves, and sensory units—that relay myriad stimuli to the brain, allowing us to grasp, press, perceive texture, and navigate our environment with astonishing precision. But touch is both biological and metaphysical—a sensation beyond the physical: an intricate interface through which we encounter the material world and register its significance in the mind.
Touch is a fundamental concept for understanding human embodiment, human relationships, and the vulnerability and intimacy of human contact. Touch opens a conceptual space for thinking about how we come to know and be known through physical presence. Perhaps then it is unsurprising that touch is also central to our experience of the sacred and the way that God manifests in our lives. Gabriel Josipovici observes, “At least part of what enters into this apprehension [of others and of the world] is our common bodily and kinesthetic reaction to a physical world which we both inhabit. For we are embodied, and it is our bodies which give us common access to the physical world.” Touch grounds perception and binds us together in a shared world.
The 2026 BYU Humanities Center annual symposium will explore touch and its central role in human experience from a variety of perspectives, including the role of touch in both religious and spiritual experience, the manner in which literature and art represent touch and tactile experience, the function of touch as a hermeneutic principle in close reading and interpretation, and the way that touch might serve as a conceptual lens for thinking about the limits of AI and technology and the boundaries of what is human.
Please join us for what promises to be a fascinating series of presentations on how touch helps us to understand our embodied human experience.