For decades, we have known that women, especially younger women, are disproportionately affected by pain disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome, endometriosis, menstrual migraines, fibromyalgia...

The following systematic review explores the uses and understandings of physical, human-to-human touch engagements in healthcare professions. Given its central importance as both a diagnostic tool…

Partner touch has many positive effects on how we feel, and a new study found that it may also have substantial health benefits in older couples.

Touch aversion and touch avoidance—negative attitudes toward and behavioural avoidance of physical contact—vary considerably across individuals and relationship contexts. However, the mechanisms…

Respiration influences neuronal activity in a number of contexts, and recent work suggests that respiratory phase is coupled to the cortical readiness potential. This study challenges this link and re...

Mizrachi et al. show that directing attention to bodily sensations, rather than away, promotes more regulated acute inflammatory responses in healthy volunteers, revealing sensory and vagal pathways l...

Ticklishness is a familiar but poorly understood experience. Xiong and Kilteni show that ticklishness is culturally shared and follows a distinct bodily topography. They evaluate different theories on...

Exercise is helpful in chronic pain, but perhaps not because it improves strength, flexibility, or biomechanics. Its value may lie in what people learn through doing it. If that's true, then perhaps we should be thinking less about exercise itself and more about meaningful activity. I wrote about exercise in March last year - here - saying that exercise is a Jolly Good Thing for everyone, but perhaps not for the reasons we used to think.

Neurons have long taken top billing in memory, but researchers are making the case for astrocytes.

“The genetics underpinning autism is extremely complex. But the evidence for primarily genetic causation is overwhelming…” writes Kevin Mitchell.

Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.

Michaela Maria Arnold, MD, is a physician and state-certified massage therapist. As an expert in touch, she has dedicated many years to studying the healing effects of touch within a medical context.…

Noxious mechanical stimuli give rise to distinct percepts, from sharp cutaneous pain to diffuse visceral discomfort, yet the nociceptor ensembles that underlie these differences remain poorly defined....

Social touch, such as hugging and hand-holding, may aid in the maintenance of feelings of social connection. Research on gentle stroking has demonstra…

The authors review evidence that the primary function of the brain, supported by distributed neural systems, is the predictive regulation of physiology (i.e., allostasis). An example from Alzheimer’s ...

Abstract figure legend Patients with fibromyalgia and no-pain controls completed questionnaire ratings of chronic pain, childhood trauma, anxiety and depression. During the first session a conditione...

Huang et al. show that prolonged exhalation increases risky decisions by enhancing reward sensitivity and cardiac parasympathetic activity. Individuals with greater parasympathetic upregulation exhibi...

YouTube video by Kevin Mitchell

By comparing the proprioceptive systems of mosquitos and Drosophila, Sweta Agrawal aims to uncover key features of the ability to sense self-movement.

CC-BY 4.0 Stefano Moia, 2026. Images are property of the original authors and should be shared following their respective licences. This presentation is otherwise licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a c...