Forgive the blog-lapse; my family has been passing around a wicked stomach virus. I was patient zero; now everyone else has it and I'm spending my free time washing barfy bed linens and shopping for herbal remedies. Parenthood!

I was tooling about for a blog topic this morning and when I found it--this article on the influence of touch in team-building, success, and life in general--I was reminded of a piece of dating advice I must have heard a hundred times growing up: "If she ever touches you--anywhere--on the arm, on the hand, on your face--for any reason, even to brush a fly away, you're in, baby!" I took this advice to heart, and must have contrived a dozen ways to trick girls into brushing into me, even by accident, just to sooth my dateless ego: I'd walk around with toy houseflies taped to my arms; I'd spend as much time as possible in the cafeteria, trying to predict which Italian Ice Sorbet the cute sophomore was going to go for and shoot for the same one just as she extended her arm. Alas, no dates came of any of it.

More story after the "jump" below...

But, miracle of miracles, all those dating books from the stone age that tell you that touch is significant weren't lying. In fact, they may have understated the case:

The evidence that [social touching, such as high-fiving and the like] can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. ...

"We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions," Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be "a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined."

To see whether a rich vocabulary of supportive touch is in fact related to performance, scientists at Berkeley recently analyzed interactions in one of the most physically expressive arenas on earth: professional basketball. Michael W. Kraus led a research team that coded every bump, hug and high five in a single game played by each team in the National Basketball Association early last season.

In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors... report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.

When I started out as a personal trainer, I was very touch-conscious: I rarely clients at all. I'm still highly aware of touching clients but now I do it with a clear intention. In my field, of course, touching has practical benefits: if I want to call a client's attention to his lower back--if he needs to extend it more in a given exercise, for instance--touching is immediately helpful. The touch brings his awareness immediately into the correct area and makes him instantly aware of the position he's in.

Massage, of course, is useful and helpful for all kinds of reasons (my clients typically don't foam-roll on their own, and I'm starting to think that having a client foam-roll on the clock is as much of a poor use of their time and money as having them walk on a treadmill on the clock, so I'll generally work them over with the roller myself before a workout).

And of course, touch is fundamental to the Feldenkrais method, and, in a different but related way, in aikido, my two new-ish obsessions on the health-and-fitness axis. In addition to the emotional content of touch which the article discusses, it's clear that a bounty of very tangible information is conveyed through touch as well: a good Feldenkrais practitioner can completely change the way you move with thirty minutes of precise manipulation of your body; a master aikidoist can "read" a vast amount of information about the direction, speed, weight, and intention behind an attack simply by bringing himself into contact with the attacker's body.

That touch also seems to help build community, teamwork, and strengthen social and emotional bonds isn't terribly surprising--but it's interesting to see the success-building value of social touch so clearly and scientifically validated.