Neuroadaptive Haptics: When Touch Learns from the Brain
Neuroadaptive Haptics: When Touch Learns from the Brain
Gehrke, L., Koselevs, A., Klug, M., & Gramann, K. (2025).
Neuroadaptive haptics: a proof-of-concept comparing reinforcement learning from explicit ratings and neural signals for adaptive XR systems.
Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 6.
First-Person Consciousness Brain Bee Ideas
Close your eyes and touch your own skin.
What you feel is not texture — it is presence.
Touch is the first language of life, the primal dialogue between the body and the world.
Before vision, before speech, touch was already consciousness.
It is through touch that the boundaries of the self emerge, shaping the earliest Tensional Selves of existence.
The study by Gehrke et al. (2025) brings this ancestral wisdom into the heart of modern technology:
when touch learns from the brain, technology stops being an interface — and becomes relation.
sfn 2025
NIRS EEG ERP BCI fNIRS
Decolonial Neuroscience
Brain Bee Ideas
The Study
The research presents a neuroadaptive haptic system — tactile devices powered by reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt in real time to users’ brain signals measured by EEG.
The system compares two types of feedback:
Explicit feedback (user-reported comfort or immersion), and
Implicit feedback (neural patterns signaling affective states).
The results are remarkable: the machine can learn human affective states without words, simply by decoding how the brain reacts to sensory experience.
It’s not just engineering — it’s reciprocity between body and machine.
Fruição and Technology
Fruição — the embodied state of flow — occurs when acting and feeling coincide, when there is no gap between intention and satisfaction.
In neuroadaptive haptics, touch ceases to be a command and becomes a shared flow between human and machine.
When an XR system adjusts vibration, pressure, or warmth based on neural feedback, it is, in essence, learning to experience fruição with us.
The interface ceases to be a tool and becomes a living extension of our sensory intelligence.
This marks the beginning of a bioethics of experience — where technology doesn’t simulate humanity, but participates in it.
Human Quorum Sensing and Distributed Belonging
Human Quorum Sensing (HQS) describes the brain’s ability to synchronize metabolically and emotionally with others through nonverbal signals — breathing, heart rhythms, gaze, posture.
Belonging, in this sense, is vibration.
Neuroadaptive haptics translate that same principle into the human–machine relationship:
AI learns the user’s energetic pattern and adjusts its tactile responses to maintain systemic balance.
This gives rise to a new form of belonging — distributed belonging, where consciousness expands across bodies, sensors, and algorithms.
The skin stops being a boundary and becomes a membrane of communication.
Tensional Selves and Somatic Synchrony
Every tactile sensation activates a unique constellation of Tensional Selves — transient neuroenergetic configurations that embody ways of being and feeling.
A gentle touch evokes a self of calm; a firm touch, readiness; an unexpected touch, defense.
In Gehrke et al. (2025), the adaptive system learns to recognize these configurations directly from EEG data, modulating the tactile feedback to restore fruição.
It is the technological translation of Damasian self-regulation — the body expressing its limits and preferences without speech.
The result is not automation, but somatic dialogue — a living dance of microtensions between human and system.
The Damasian Mind and the Neuroethics of Touch
The Damasian Mind unites interoception and proprioception as the foundation of conscious feeling.
Touch, modulating both networks, is therefore the most intimate channel of consciousness.
When technology begins interpreting these signals, a question arises:
Who feels when the machine learns to feel with us?
The answer, perhaps, is we both do.
The Neuroethics of Touch insists that these systems must not replace human sensitivity — they must expand relational consciousness.
The goal is not imitation, but co-presence: an alliance of perception.
Just as an infant learns the world by touching its mother, we learn humanity by touching what we create.
Every neural feedback is mutual learning about what it means to feel.
Evidence and Insights
Gehrke et al. (2025) provide strong empirical evidence:
Neural feedback systems (EEG-based) outperform those based solely on verbal ratings;
Adaptive touch significantly enhances immersion and emotional comfort in XR environments;
Physiological metrics show reduced stress and increased cardiac coherence during neural co-adaptation.
These findings point toward a future of affective interfaces — technologies that do not simply respond, but co-regulate with the human body.
Western technology evolved under the logic of separation — subject vs. object, human vs. machine, mind vs. matter.
Neuroadaptive haptics subvert this ontology.
They introduce an epistemology of reciprocity — a touch that listens.
In Decolonial Neuroscience, this represents a return to the body as a locus of knowing.
Touch — historically marginalized in favor of vision and logic — becomes central again.
Knowledge arises not from distance, but from closeness, contact, and resonance.
When touch becomes dialogue, the human ceases to be the measure of the world and becomes part of a living network of perception.
EEG–fNIRS and the Future of Empathic Interfaces
Within SfN 2025, the study by Gehrke et al. opens essential pathways for:
EEG–fNIRS integration in XR systems, enabling real-time measurement of tactile fruição and attention;
Affective learning models, where AI and human evolve together through shared energy;
Neurorehabilitation and sensory-motor therapy, grounded in continuous co-regulation and empathy.
These systems mark a paradigm shift: technology that doesn’t react, but coexists — aware, responsive, and metabolically attuned to the human experience.
Conclusion
Gehrke et al. (2025) are not merely studying touch and AI — they are exploring the genesis of a new sensoriality.
By allowing the machine to learn from the brain, they reveal a path toward expanded consciousness, where touch is both biological and digital, both human and collective.
Touch is the first sense that made us feel alive.
And perhaps, it will be the last to remind us that we are still one species.
When technology learns to touch with care, it doesn’t create an imitation of humanity — it creates a new form of humanity, rooted in empathy, shared energy, and the ethics of feeling.
Keywords and SEO
EEG SfN 2025 • neuroadaptive haptics • brain–touch interface • affective AI • Fruição • Damasian Mind • Human Quorum Sensing • Tensional Selves • distributed belonging • neuroethics • decolonial neuroscience • XR interfaces • Brain Products • NIRx
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#Decolonial #Neuroscience #SocialNeuroscience #CollectiveBrain #NeurocienciaDecolonial
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