Hugged

How many times did someone touch you yesterday?

Not brushed past you on a train. Touched you, deliberately, because you were you.

Most people, counting honestly, arrive at a number between zero and two. A great many arrive at zero, are surprised, and then explain it away.

We are a species built out of physical contact, and the evidence has been accumulating quietly for decades. There is a nerve in your skin that does almost nothing except register being stroked at the speed of human affection. Four hundred people were deliberately infected with a cold virus, and those who had been hugged more got less ill. Three thousand newborns were randomised between an incubator and their mother's bare chest, and the trial was stopped early because too many of the babies in the incubators were dying.

Then, across a single century, without anyone deciding it, we engineered almost all of it out of ordinary life.

Hugged is the case for getting it back, and a book that shows its working. Inside, you'll discover:

• Why touch matters for health, happiness and connection, explained through real research in plain language
• The truth behind popular claims, including the famous twenty-second hug, the "love hormone" oxytocin, and the most-quoted line in the whole literature of touch, which turns out to have no source at all
• How we lost touch, and why so many of us are running a deficit without realising it
• How to bring more closeness back into your life and the lives of the people you love

For readers of popular science, psychology and self-help, and for anyone who has been missing a hug.

Being held is not sentiment. It is physiology. And almost all of us are running a deficit.

Also by Dimitris Bronowski: Touched: 134 True Stories of the Hands, Hugs and Embraces That Changed Lives and History, and The Touch Journal, a 100-day companion to bring more touch into your life.