A bit linkbaity; it's not remote touch per se, but the ability to detect a buried object in sand by touch. The subjects couldn't touch the object directly but could feel where it was through the sand. Which doesn't seem weird or supernatural to me, the way the sand shifts etc will be affected by an object inside of it.

> Remote touch allows the detection of objects buried under granular materials through subtle mechanical cues transmitted through the medium, when a moving pressure is applied nearby.

> These findings confirm that people can genuinely sense an object before physical contact

So, it’s just touch, relayed through grains of sand.

Less clickbaity title: Humans have 'remote' touch like sandpipers, research shows

It seems a bit of a stretch to separate this from the ordinary sense of touch.

I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling / reasoning.

Couldn't you describe that effect where you can reliably guess the size and other features of things by sound without seeing them as a seperate sense? Well, it's not, again it's just a combo of a sense plus mental modelling / pattern recognition.

> Tactile-based Object Retrieval from Granular Media [0]

Home page with videos, and links to papers and github.

> Tactile-based Object Retrieval From Granular Media (Arxiv) [1]

Damn paywalls, when the material is available from the authors, and in much greater detail.

[0] https://jxu.ai/geotact/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04536

I possess an eighth sense which allows me to determine whether or not I have received an email by looking at my phone and seeing the notification for such. I don't even need to open the email app and I can sense that one has arrived.

Yeah, this seems like a phenomena that I was already aware of.

When you hold a pen in your hand and touch a piece of paper with the tip of the pen, you can "feel" the tip of the pen touching the paper even though what you actually feel is the change in pressure of the pen against your fingers.

Did I miss the memo? When did we get a sixth sense?

What's really fun is - under "quiet" enough conditions - being able to kinda feel walls from up to maybe an inch or so away. Not sure if it's air currents or reflected body heat or sound waves or what, but there's something there.