New Queen Mary Study Reveals Humans Can Sense Buried Objects in Sand Without Direct Contact
New research from Queen Mary University of London uncovers an unexpected “remote touch” ability in human fingertips.
Most of us like to think we know our senses pretty well. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, it’s all pretty standard. But according to new research led by Dr Elisabetta Versace and Dr Laura Crucianelli from the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, we’ve been overlooking one surprising ability all along: humans can detect objects buried in sand before touching them.
It’s not telekinesis or Jedi-level intuition (you won’t be locating your phone through the sofa cushions anytime soon), but it is a subtle, measurable sensory skill that has never before been documented in humans.
Feeling Without Touching
The phenomenon is called remote touch, the ability to perceive disturbances in a granular material (like sand) caused by hidden objects. Some shorebirds use it naturally: species like sandpipers have specialised beaks that sense tiny pressure changes in sediment as they probe for prey. Humans, famously beakless, have never been known to do anything similar.
But Dr Versace's multidisciplinary team, working across behavioural neuroscience, engineering and robotics, suspected that our fingertips might be more perceptive than previously realised. When a finger moves through sand, it pushes grains ahead of it, altering how the particles flow. Could we be subconsciously detecting those shifts?
To find out, the researchers designed a controlled experiment where volunteers raked a single fingertip slowly through a long, sand-filled box. Buried somewhere inside was a small plastic cube. Crucially, participants were asked to stop as soon as they sensed the presence of an object, but before making direct contact.
Across 12 volunteers, people correctly detected the buried cube around 71 percent of the time, typically from just under 7 centimetres away. Importantly, this wasn’t guesswork: even with strict statistical controls in place, participants showed strong sensitivity and little evidence of a bias toward over-detecting. As Dr Crucianelli explains:
“Human touch is extraordinarily refined. But seeing that sensitivity extend into a medium like sand without direct contact was genuinely surprising.”
Putting Humans Up Against a Robot
To understand how this human ability compares to current technology, researchers in Queen Mary’s Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary (ARQ) group, including co-authors Zhengqi Chen and Dr Lorenzo Jamone, built a robotic analogue of the human experiment.
A tactile-equipped robotic finger mounted on a UR5 robotic arm performed the same slow raking motion through sand. Meanwhile, a machine-learning model was trained to detect patterns in the sensor data that indicated the presence of an object.
The robot could technically detect objects from slightly further away than humans. But it came with a major flaw: it also generated false alarms. Lots of them.
Where human participants achieved a respectable 70.7 percent precision, the robot managed just 40 percent, often “thinking” it sensed an object long before it reached the correct location. In other words: humans are more cautious and reliable. Robots are overconfident.
As the researchers note, this mirrors a broader challenge in AI systems: models that are highly sensitive can become too eager, predicting patterns where none exist, a kind of tactile hallucination.
Why Does This Ability Exist?
The finding opens a fascinating new chapter in our understanding of human touch. While we rely on mechanoreceptors in the skin to detect pressure, vibration, stretch and motion, the fact that these receptors can pick up disturbances transmitted through sand had not been shown before.
“It expands what we think of as the human tactile field,” says Dr Versace. “Our perception does not end at the skin. It interacts dynamically with the environment, even in ways we’re not consciously aware of.”
This aligns with theoretical models of how granular media behave. As a finger moves, it creates a wedge-like region of displaced grains that can extend several centimetres ahead of the fingertip. Hidden objects modify how that wedge forms, and humans appear able to detect subtle changes in resistance.
Toward Smarter Robots and Assistive Tech
Although remote touch in humans may not have everyday applications, understanding it could unlock new possibilities in robotics, prosthetics, and assistive technologies.
Robots capable of reliably sensing objects buried in particulate materials could support tasks such as:
- archaeological exploration and delicate excavation
- planetary science missions on sandy or dusty terrains
- search-and-rescue operations involving collapsed structures
- industrial sorting or handling of granular materials
As Jamone explains in the paper, improving robotic tactile perception requires better models of how humans interpret tactile cues, and this research provides a crucial benchmark.
A Hidden Sense, Brought to Light
Remote touch may not be the flashiest superpower, but it does reveal something far more profound: that human sensory perception is richer, deeper and more adaptable than we often assume.