...or, Does a Garment Feel Different When You Have Enough Attention Available to Notice It?
Saturday morning is coffee, bare feet, and maybe nowhere you need to be for another hour. So you pull on something soft and, for a moment, actually notice it, this feels really good. Which is interesting because the fabric did not become softer because it is Saturday. Your skin did not suddenly acquire new nerve endings. The clothes may be exactly the same ones you wore Tuesday. So what changed? Maybe you finally had enough attention available to notice them.
We tend to think of touch as fairly straightforward. Something touches the skin. We feel it. Because touch is not just happening at your skin. The biology is considerably more impressive. Because our skin contains specialized sensory structures that respond to different kinds of mechanical information. So the forces acting on the skin are converted into neural signals, and different mechanoreceptor systems contribute to our ability to detect and discriminate touch. In other words, the feeling of fabric against your body begins with a remarkably sophisticated sensory system.
But the signal arriving from the skin is only part of the story. What you notice depends, in part, on where your attention is. Because your brain pays attention to touch too.
Most of us know what visual attention feels like. You can look directly at something and still not notice it. But then someone points it out and suddenly it is impossible to miss. And touch has attention, too.
Research on tactile attention shows that attention can be deliberately directed toward touch, and even toward a particular location on the body. Studies of sustained tactile attention have found that attending to a location can enhance the processing of touch there, with measurable changes in somatosensory brain regions.
That creates the possibility for something as ordinary as getting dressed to become far more important also setting the tone for your entire day. Because your clothing may be supplying sensory information all day long, even if you are not necessarily attending to all of it. And thank goodness for this, there are emails to answer. But touch doesn't only tell you what you are feeling.
Touch also has another dimension that impacts you each moment of each day. In fact, neuroscientists distinguish between discriminative touch, information that helps us identify things like location, pressure and physical characteristics, and affective touch, the dimension of touch associated with how contact feels to us.
The distinction between touch that is called discriminative touch and that which is called affective touch matters because sometimes you notice a garment because something has gone wrong. Like when a seam moved, or a waistband rolled, or something is pulling, and suddenly something needs immediate adjusting. The garment has recruited your attention, but there is another kind of noticing.
Soft, smooth, warm, ...that little stretch when you move. The feeling of putting something on your body and thinking, "Oh. That's nice." Those experiences both involve noticing clothing. And they are not the same kind of experience. So there is attention you give but also attention that something takes.
We talk a lot at TuKiss about clothing noise: the small sensory interruptions created when clothing keeps asking to be noticed. You know the drill: pull this down, move this back, fix this, adjust that. But perhaps there is an important distinction hiding inside the idea of noticing clothes.
There is attention you choose to give something. And there is attention something demands from you. Saturday morning makes the difference unusually easy to see. Before the day fills up, you might have enough attention available to register the softness against your skin. Where the waistband sits. What happens when you curl your legs underneath you. The pleasure of something that feels particularly good.
Then you make coffee. Feed the dog. Find your phone. Start your day. And ideally, your clothes stop being interesting. Maybe that's the luxury.
The goal may not be to never notice what you are wearing. There are moments when noticing feels pretty delicious.
The better question may be what happens next, "Can you enjoy how something feels when you put it on without having to keep thinking about it three hours later?" Or maybe, "Can clothing earn your attention for a moment without demanding it for the rest of the day?" Because maybe the luxury is getting to decide when your clothes are worth noticing.
Sources
Handler, A., & Ginty, D. D. (2021). The mechanosensory neurons of touch and their mechanisms of activation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 22(9), 521-537.
McGlone, F., Wessberg, J., & Olausson, H. (2014). Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling. Neuron, 82(4), 737-755.
Spence, C., & Gallace, A. (2007). Recent developments in the study of tactile attention. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 61(3), 196.