Humans have remote touch 'seventh sense' like sandpipers
14 comments
·November 8, 2025wumms
anigbrowl
or 'Human touch is sensitive to material dynamics', although that's getting into the realms of the abstract.
inshard
Same sentiment. It’s still touch through a slightly less solid medium.
Cthulhu_
A bit linkbaity; it's not remote touch per se, but the ability to detect a buried object in sand by touch. The subjects couldn't touch the object directly but could feel where it was through the sand. Which doesn't seem weird or supernatural to me, the way the sand shifts etc will be affected by an object inside of it.
cpdean
I possess an eighth sense which allows me to determine whether or not I have received an email by looking at my phone and seeing the notification for such. I don't even need to open the email app and I can sense that one has arrived.
not_a_bot_4sho
Child's play.
Not only can I do the same, I can also sense the contents of my work email without reading it.
Very specifically, I can sense it's going to be related to jam packing LLMs into any and every @#$&ing thing we work on because AI.
ithkuil
When you hold a pen in your hand and touch a piece of paper with the tip of the pen, you can "feel" the tip of the pen touching the paper even though what you actually feel is the change in pressure of the pen against your fingers.
dinkleberg
Did I miss the memo? When did we get a sixth sense?
davnicwil
It seems a bit of a stretch to separate this from the ordinary sense of touch.
I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling / reasoning.
Couldn't you describe that effect where you can reliably guess the size and other features of things by sound without seeing them as a seperate sense? Well, it's not, again it's just a combo of a sense plus mental modelling / pattern recognition.
ivanbakel
> I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling / reasoning
That seems like a very strong claim against the paper’s results. What makes you think that the study participants located the cube with reasoning, rather than unthinking sense?
I think we can be too quick to write things off as somehow coming from conscious thought when they bypass that part of our minds entirely. I don’t form sentences with a rational use of grammar. I don’t determine how heavy something is by reasoning about its weight before I pick it up. There is something much more interesting happening cognitively in these cases that we shouldn’t dismiss.
oasisaimlessly
'normal world modelling' doesn't imply conscious thought to me. Humans do a ton of stuff unconsciously e.g. 'gut instinct'.
davnicwil
exactly. Gp, I meant reasoning in the automatic sense, like how you reason about where a ball will land from afar as you go to catch it.
k310
> Tactile-based Object Retrieval from Granular Media [0]
Home page with videos, and links to papers and github.
> Tactile-based Object Retrieval From Granular Media (Arxiv) [1]
Damn paywalls, when the material is available from the authors, and in much greater detail.
cbsmith
Yeah, this seems like a phenomena that I was already aware of.
> Remote touch allows the detection of objects buried under granular materials through subtle mechanical cues transmitted through the medium, when a moving pressure is applied nearby.
> These findings confirm that people can genuinely sense an object before physical contact
So, it’s just touch, relayed through grains of sand.
Less clickbaity title: Humans have 'remote' touch like sandpipers, research shows