
Face-touching may reflect unconscious hand-smelling [pdf] - sturza
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2019.0372
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nateburke
Related: growing up, one of the things that my sister and I would joke about
was the extent to which we both would both unconsciously smell our wrists and
lower arm areas while doing math. We would catch each other all the time doing
it and it was hilarious. Here is an example of what I am talking about:

[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/03/24/business/24artifi...](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/03/24/business/24artificial1/24artificial1-superJumbo.jpg)

As a completely uninformed guess, I think the link between focus and smelling
one's hand/wrist might have something to do with early feelings of comfort as
an infant associated with the smell of a parent's skin. The idea being that
introducing a close approximation of that smell would remove any distraction
brought on by other, less familiar smells, and increase focus.

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kylek
This must be why beard stroking is effective.

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elliekelly
I wonder whether makeup influences the frequency or location of face touches.
I wear glasses/contacts and I’ve noticed I rub my eyes fairly often during my
(recently makeup-free) work day but I definitely don’t when I’m wearing
mascara or false lashes.

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telesilla
I am the same but maybe because we've learnt over time that touching our
makeup smudges it? In which case, perhaps it's a good idea to wear a lot these
coming weeks!

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dopylitty
I've been wondering what counts as touching your face for purposes of virus
transmission.

In the paper they highlight people whose fingers are under or in their noses
but I wonder if something like grazing your cheek or forehead would count. Is
there some mechanism the virus would use to migrate from the forehead/cheek
into the eyes/nose or is the "don't touch your face" advice really shorthand
for "don't pick your nose or rub your eyes"?

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serf
>Is there some mechanism the virus would use to migrate from the
forehead/cheek into the eyes/nose

i'm not a doctor/virologist/biologist/whatever, but one could imagine
someones' perspiring face may aerosolize whatever was on its' surface due to
the evaporative cooling effect.

I don't know whether or not that's practically feasible.

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murtio
Very interesting topic. I've noticed that whenever I wear my favorite perfume
on my beard, I'll spend the following 4 hours touching my hands to remember
good memories attached to that smell.

For people looking into the effect of self-face-touching with virus spreading,

"We note that this behaviour offace-touching may be responsible for
transferring nearly 25%of respiratory illness."

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lolc
I know how the wooden beams in my office smell. My mind can summon the smell
of the handrails in the train station, disturbingly. The smell of my clothes,
and crotch, before and after workout, it's right there. It takes me a while to
accept clothes I got from other people as my own. Using strangers' detergent
alienates me from my own clothes.

I don't like to touch things I know other people touch. (It's a weak effect,
and doesn't bother me.) Is this related to smell? Do I not like getting other
people's smell on my hands? Or is it just hygiene training? Hard to tell. If
you were to count, I'd be smelling my hands a lot less when riding a bicycle
not my own. Judging by that study.

It's interesting how the authors speculate about the link between self-
smelling and consciousness. I am who I smell.

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xyzzy_plugh
Odd. I touch my face almost compulsively, but I have an extremely poor sense
of smell. I smell my hands right now, I can't tell what they smell like at
all.

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sdenton4
Self-smelling could be a mechanism for figuring out self-smell for the
purposes of not getting confused by it when trying to distinguish
environmental sources. In which case it would be perfectly reasonable to not
smell 'anything' when actively smelling oneself.

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pjc50
Looks like the question really driving this paper is "why are humans touching
their faces so much [and spreading viruses]?"

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wideasleep1
Lost me on this: "We then detail evidence from the one study that implicated
an olfactory origin for this behaviour:"...

One. Okay. Helps explain 'may reflect'...

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gorbachev15
Add [pdf] to title due to auto-download

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contingencies
Weird verb choice, _subserves_. I would have used _effects_ or _facilitates_.

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dang
We've put a different, less subservient phrase from the article in the title
above.

The submitted title was "A hypothesis that self-face-touching subserves self-
smelling", which I assume was an admirable attempt to make the title less
baity by using representative language from the text.

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quaquaqua1
I am a native English speaker who graduated with a 3.8 GPA in History from a
world Top 30 university.

I still had to use a dictionary to understand what "subserves" means in this
context.

Our language is so hilariously broken with all of the "aliasing" that is used
by people who want to make themselves sound smarter.

What we should do instead is try to make sure other people can understand what
we are trying to say.

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throwanem
I'm another native speaker who graduated high school more by dint of luck and
pity than for any other reason, and then went to work instead of college.
Between the context and the similarity with the adjective "subservient",
"subserves" proved trivial to parse, and I haven't yet been able to come up
with another expression of the same concept that is also as concise. In any
case, it seems unlikely that educational attainment is all that useful an
indicator here.

In general writing, your point has merit. In the title of an academic paper
published in a journal of philosophy, I don't know that the strictures and
desiderata of general writing wholly apply.

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quaquaqua1
"A hypothesis that if one touches their face, they are more likely to smell
themselves as well"

is an infinitely clearer title, in my opinion.

If your goal is for only 5 people to understand you and think you are cool,
then it's no surprise why we have academic titles like

"Embodied intersectionality and the intersectional management of hotel labour:
the everyday experiences of social differentiation in customer‐oriented work"

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throwanem
The purpose of academic publication is to communicate with others in the same
field, where the terminology of art is shared among all. Not having acquainted
yourself with a given field's specific lexicon, why would you expect to
understand without effort the meaning of titles that make heavy use of it?

For that matter, not being a participant in the work of which these
publications constitute a part, why insist that those who _do_ participate in
it to talk with one another in the same language they'd use to make their work
understandable to a lay audience such as yourself?

None of this seems very reasonable to me. You've done a splendid job of making
clear that you value your own opinion in such matters quite highly, but you've
left much to be desired in explaining why anyone else should do the same.

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lowdose
Maybe this behavior is bit more sophisticated version of what dogs to when
meet. Dogs like push their nose comfortably in areas we generally prefer to
hide from strangers, when they like the smell a good chance this is rewarded
with a doggy style session.

I sometimes think we have made the persuasion game so complicated and we could
be a lot happier if everybody starts having 10x more sex tomorrow.

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qubex
Fallacy of Chesterton's Fence: Don”t demolish things (including social norms)
until you understand why they arose in the first place. Most likely somebody
solved a problem you no longer perceive because the solution is currently in
place and blocking its manifestation. Sure, the problems might be antiquated
cruft that is no longer relevant and no longer serves a purpose... but it
might not.

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lowdose
Let's for simplicity apply Occam's razor:

When we didn't have modern birth control solutions cultural rituals were an
effective measure against women giving birth to seven children from different
men.

We removed that natural health taxing consequence of having sex. Could you
elaborate on your fence a bit because I'm always curious about unknown
unknowns to me.

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qubex
I haven’t stated an opinion on the matter, I’m just cautioning against these
offhanded remarks about massive societal re-engineering.

Though your example is telling, actually. Humans are fairly unusual insofar as
females do not have significant observable markers of being fertile or not (in
the animal example, “in heat”). So you’d really have to go back and look at
why evolution selected for this particular characteristic and what its
consequences were, how it influenced sexual norms, and only _then_ layer on
the consideration you make about contraception.

And yes, this is vastly contentious, and no, we are not going to solve it in
the footnotes of a tech-centric forum. But my message was intended to be more
general.

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lowdose
Fair enough. My point was coming more from the view that we still treat women
like second class people.

600 million women were married before they reached 18. 200 million women have
experience genital mutilation so I think it fair to say in most cultures the
accepted behavior of women is severely restricted in every possible way.

The women I met have all surprised me with a daily desire for sex activity.
Many of them have had slut shaming experiences while growing up.

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qubex
Again, a bit of a sweeping (and false) perception informed by our local
historical and cultural context. There is strong anthropological evidence that
for dozens of millennia matriarchal societies were the norm. This survived
well into the pre-colonial era in Africa. It just _appears_ that way because
patriarchal structures have dominated for most of the recent past (~4000-5000
years), and because this period coincides with the historical record... again,
is this a quirk or a consequence, and in the latter case, which way does
causation flow?

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lowdose
We have no written records about the period you mention so I cannot imagine
how strong this evidence is. Africa's population is for the majority
practicing the Islam since a millennium before the colonial era, and that's a
religion with a classical patriarchal society structure.

While I have been very charitable in my interpretation of your arguments. You
keep using straw man arguments in our discussion again and again.

You literally shift the goal post with every comment you make, I think this is
an inferior way of discourse.

I have seen comments in the past that were a lot more impressive, expressing
thoughts of deep thinking. This has not been your best work and decide not to
engage anymore with you on this topic.

