TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have uncovered evidence that humans may possess a “hidden” sense—one that allows us to detect objects without directly touching them.
This ability, described as a form of remote touch, would sit alongside the five traditional senses plus proprioception, the sense that helps us understand body position and movement.
The findings come from an experiment designed to explore how the brain extracts structure from the environment using implicit knowledge. In the study, participants were asked to gently move their fingertips across the surface of a box filled with sand.
Their task was to report when they sensed the presence of a cube buried beneath the surface, without actually making contact with it.
The setup was engineered to mirror the physics of granular materials like sand or salt. When a hand moves near a buried object, the shift in grains creates subtle pressure changes that can travel outward. The question was whether humans could perceive these faint ripples.
The results, published in IEEE Xplore on October 21, were striking. Volunteers detected the hidden cube with up to 70 percent accuracy, even when the object was positioned about 6.9 centimeters (2.7 inches) below the sand.
This suggests that humans can sense minute pressure disturbances in loose materials—an ability that until now had never been formally recognized.
“This is the first time remote touch has been examined in humans, and it reshapes our understanding of how we perceive the world,” said Elisabetta Versace of Queen Mary’s Department of Experimental and Biological Psychology, as quoted by Earth on November 12, 2025.
Outperforming Robots and Mirroring Shorebirds
To benchmark human performance, the team created a parallel experiment using a UR5 robotic arm equipped with tactile sensors. The robot, trained with a long short-term memory machine-learning model to detect patterns in sequential data, occasionally identified buried objects at slightly farther distances than humans.
However, its accuracy hovered around just 40 percent and it produced many false positives. In contrast, the human participants showed more consistent and reliable detection, highlighting the remarkable sensitivity of the human hand.
Interestingly, this remote-touch capability resembles the way certain shorebirds, for example, the red knot, locate prey buried in sand. Previous research shows that these birds use specialized receptors in their beaks to sense pressure changes beneath the surface, allowing them to detect hidden food.
A Long-Lost Human Skill?
Although the discovery appears to reveal a new facet of human perception, researchers believe this ability may have existed in early humans and gradually faded from everyday use.
Ancient societies that relied on tactile navigation, excavation, or tracking may have unconsciously used remote touch more frequently, refining the skill over generations.
The findings deepen scientific understanding of how humans interpret physical forces in their surroundings. They also point to practical applications, such as helping archaeologists or excavators identify buried objects more safely by paying attention to subtle shifts in pressure or airflow.
Ultimately, this research underscores the extraordinary sensitivity of the human sensory system—much of which we may still be only beginning to uncover.