Humans Can Detect Buried Objects Without Touching Them, Study Finds

Recent research suggests that humans have a surprising ability—we can sometimes feel a physical object before making contact with it.

In a study published this past October in the journal IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning, researchers found that, similarly to some shorebirds, we have a form of “remote touch.” Simply put, when you move your hand through granular materials like sand, you can feel an object buried in said material before touching it directly.

“It’s the first time that remote touch has been studied in humans and it changes our conception of the perceptual world (what is called the ‘receptive field’) in living beings, including humans,” Elisabetta Versace, co-author of the study and lead of the Prepared Minds Lab at Queen Mary University of London, s