Humans Have A “Seventh Sense” That Lets You Touch Things From A Distance

It’s the first time that the new sense, called “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,” said Elisabetta Versace, Senior Lecturer in Psychology and lead of the Prepared Minds Lab at Queen Mary University of London, who designed the study, in a statement. 

It is, in short, the ability to detect objects buried within granular materials. You’ve likely seen it being used by certain birds along the seashore: they probe the sand with their beaks, using pressure and vibration cues to find their prey hiding underneath.

Now, though, it’s been shown to exist in humans too. In the first of a pair of experiments, volunteers were tasked with detecting objects hidden in sand using their fingertips only – and not only did they succeed, but they did so with startling precision, finding the objects almost three times out of four despite quite a bit of sand being in the way.

“Human results confirm detection with 70.7 percent precision at a 6.9 cm distance [2.72 inches],” reports a writeup of the study, which was presented at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) in September this year – though the authors note that the median was only 2.7 centimeters (1.06 inches).

That’s not just impressive – it’s bordering on the impossible. The cues that signal the presence of a solid object all come from detecting minute displacements in the sand surrounding them – and using math and theoretical physics, it’s possible to figure out the limits of how far those tiny perturbations can reach. The answer, incredibly, is just a single millimeter out from where the volunteers were working: “Drawing from granular media particle interaction theory, we hypothesize tactile cues extend up to 7 cm [2.76 inches],” the researchers wrote. 

It’s no doubt a cool result – but its impact reaches further than just “hey, we have a new sense we didn’t know about.” There are a bunch of situations where an ability to sense things without physically touching them would come in handy, for example, “locating archaeological artifacts without damage, or exploring sandy or granular terrains such as Martian soil or ocean floors,” suggested Zhengqi Chen, a PhD student in the Advanced Robotics Lab at Queen Mary.

But many of these applications are likely to rely on robots rather than humans – so, now we know a bit more about how we experience remote touch, can we figure out how to use it for robots?

This is where the second experiment comes in. Next, the team used a robotic tactile sensor, trained using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm, to try to replicate the humans’ achievements. 

And, perhaps surprisingly, it worked. The robots weren’t as accurate as the humans – they achieved only a 40 percent precision rate – but they had a noticeably better range than their fleshy compatriots, detecting objects from 7.1 centimeters (2.8 inches) with a median distance of 6 centimeters (2.36 inches).

“What makes this research especially exciting is how the human and robotic studies informed each other,” noted Lorenzo Jamone, Associate Professor in Robotics and AI at University College London. “The human experiments guided the robot’s learning approach, and the robot’s performance provided new perspectives for interpreting the human data.” 

“It’s a great example of how psychology, robotics, and artificial intelligence can come together, showing that multidisciplinary collaboration can spark both fundamental discoveries and technological innovation,” he said.

With a better understanding of this new sense, the team hope that future engineers may have a leg up in the design and development of specialist robotic systems – ones that can be deployed in situations where direct touch or vision is impossible or limited.

“The discovery opens possibilities for designing tools and assistive technologies that extend human tactile perception,” said Chen. “These insights could inform the development of advanced robots capable of delicate operations.”

“More broadly, this research paves the way for touch-based systems that make hidden or hazardous exploration safer, smarter, and more effective.”

The study is published in IEEE Xplore.