Tactile Qualia

I'm working on two long essays: one about existential meaning and one about the function of the basal ganglia in time perception, attention, task engagement, and impulsivity. Hopefully those will be complete some time mid-May. Until then, here's some crap about an indecorous quale.
 
The internet does a good job chronicling idiosyncratic human pleasures. One cluster of these I will call "visceral fit", for lack of a better term. (Edit: What a bad term!) The stereotypical elicitor is popping bubble wrap. Visceral fit is felt in response to some haptic stimulation, and other-modality cues that co-occur with that haptic stimulation. Also, I don't know quite how to say it, but, the stimuli which produce the specific quale I'm pinpointing are more textural, and do not extend as clearly to muscular stimulation such as in massage or the relieving one's bladder. (Edit: They're cutaneous sensations!)

One evolutionary domain giving rise to visceral fit qualia is close interpersonal contact, especially through grooming and sex. Elicitors from this domain include the sounds of head scratching, whispering, and various fluid sounds - produced not only by the movement of saliva in the mouth. Connoisseurs of abrasive and fluid sounds can be found at /r/asmr and /r/gonewildaudio, the latter of which is of course porn. Probably the prickly sound and feeling of hair clippers on one's neck falls here too.

Another domain for which the elusive textural stimulation quale pings is that of food. John Allen writes an opinion piece about the evolution of human preference for juicy, crunchy food, concluding that the preference was made adaptive by the prehistoric advent of cooking techniques, rather than finding fixation through the benefits of eating arthropods with chitinous exoskeletons. Some food consumption sounds will provoke disgust in the ordinary human audience, but certainly there are also sounds, perhaps relating to the consumption of crunchy and juicy food, that are pleasing, and which perhaps evoke tactile mental simulation. Maybe the pleasant crackling of fire falls here too.

Disgust does not fully inhibit tactile sensory pleasure, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the reddit community which delights in viewing ruptured cutaneous pathologies. This is the dark and forbidden side of grooming pleasure, and I will not provide a link.

Those are the more easily interpreted elicitors. /r/oddlysatisfying chronicles many other things which produce the quale: Things fitting tightly into receptacles or coming into synchronous alignment. Materials being cut and abraded from surfaces of objects. Changes throughout entire object volumes, such as by crushing, shattering, shredding, melting, and deformations to elastic solids, viscous fluids, and semi-solid mixtures.

There is a great diversity of things that produce tactile simulation pleasures, and the whole thing feels a little bit naughty. Someone with too much time or the right comparative advantage should write about it with a better informed and more cutting analysis than I have provided here, because brains are interesting, and shared aesthetics are kind of important, and naughty things are fun.

Edit: Q-tips in ears! Can't believe I didn't think to bring that up. When stimuli in other modalities trigger a tactile response, the cross-modal response is so very much like cotton swabs in the ear. As for other-modality stimuli that I failed to mention: Some people get gooseflesh when they listen to music and call it "frisson" (though most of the stuff on /r/frisson doesn't do it for me, so maybe there's wide variance in which music triggers which people?). I should look at what else produces gooseflesh. And let's not forget sparkles! Some people get ASMR from looking at sparkles. Like a visual-to-haptic synaesthesia. So now I'm looking into tactile hallucinations, goosebumps, and music-frisson generally (which has a much larger literature than ASMR for some reason). Did you know that there are different cutaneous receptors for different kinds of mechanical stimulation? Maybe I can distinguish elicitors of good feelings associated with each kind of cutaneous mechanoreceptor. If that categorization seems compelling, it would make for a pleasing correspondence between aesthetic concepts and aesthetic hardware. To the literature!