Microneurography enables recording from single peripheral afferents in awake humans, providing a unique window into the neural basis of touch and pain. Using this approach, we have identified unmyelinated Ctactile (CT) afferents that encode the affective, socially relevant aspects of gentle touch, alongside rapidly conducting myelinated afferents that can contribute to pain perception. These findings challenge the classical modality-specific segregation of somatosensory fibres, highlighting a more integrated organization of tactile and nociceptive processing. In a neurohaptics context, I will discuss how these peripheral signals shape perceptual qualities such as pleasantness and pain. By integrating microneurography with psychophysics and emerging transcriptomic profiling of human dorsal root ganglion neurons, this work links molecular identity to neural coding and perception, informing the design of haptic interfaces that engage neural mechanisms underlying both pleasurable touch and protective nociceptive signalling.

As societies become increasingly connected through digital technologies, many forms of division persist across physical distance, disability, and social differences. Haptic technologies offer a unique opportunity to bridge these divides by enabling people not only to exchange information but also to share embodied experiences. This talk presents our recent research in haptics and human augmentation, including wearable haptic systems, embodied skill sharing, and cybernetic avatars that extend human capabilities beyond conventional physical constraints. These projects demonstrate how touch can foster empathy, enhance social participation, and connect people across diverse backgrounds and abilities. Moving beyond its traditional role in improving realism and immersion, haptics can serve as a powerful medium for social connection. By designing technologies that enable people to share experiences, abilities, and perspectives, we can create a more inclusive future in which human differences become opportunities for collaboration rather than barriers to participation. 

Dexterous manipulation requires a continuous, bi-directional flow of information between the hand and the brain. While vision allows us to anticipate forces and bypass reflex delays, there are many real-world environments where visual feedback is absent or fails to generalize across changing contexts. In these scenarios, how does the brain maintain control? The answer lies in the reduction of sensorimotor complexity through elementary descriptors and synergies. In this talk, I will review the understanding we have reached as to how the human brain organizes and couples efferent motor commands and afferent tactile feedback. I will focus on tactile flow — the skin-deformation velocity field — as a prime example of an afferent synergy. I will discuss the neurological and behavioral background o these ideas, and illustrate their implications for engineering capable robotics and natural-feeling prosthetic devices and assistive devices. I will finally give my perspective on how contingencies of sensorimotor synergies may be regarded as the elementary words of a language physical AI may speak tomorrow.

Combining tactile and thermal feedback in multi-sensory cutaneous displays can dramatically increase the sense of realism and immersion in virtual and augmented reality environments and enhance the bandwidth of skin-based communication. Effectively pairing these senses requires understanding their fundamental differences, particularly in their temporal and spatial features. In this talk I will provide an overview of thermal and tactile perceptual processes from a display-design perspective, focusing on object recognition and information transmission. I will address the core challenges of concurrent cue presentation, namely the profound differences in processing speeds and marked variations in spatial acuity across the body, and discuss how stimulus delivery can be optimized. Although these interactions between the two senses are complex, integrating thermal inputs into tactile displays clearly enhances the user experience and enables entirely novel sensory experiences.