I Felt a Hair Through 17 Pages

The Old Chiropractic School test that blurs science and metaphysics

You might not have gone to chiropractic school, but picture this classic training drill. They hand you an old-school phone book, the thick Yellow Pages kind, and lay a single human hair on the first page. The goal is simple: close the book and try to feel the hair through the paper with your fingertips. Then flip to the next page (now two sheets between you and the hair) and try again. Keep going, adding pages, until you can’t detect it anymore.

I got up to 17 pages back in school, fingers pressed hard and totally locked in concentration. It wasn’t some mystical gift. It was just relentless practice sharpening your sense of touch until it became almost unbelievably sensitive.

Here’s the part that still makes me curious: where exactly does raw science end and something harder to measure begin?

At lower page counts, say five or ten, it’s pure physiology. Studies show students reliably improve their two-point discrimination and ability to detect tiny differences in pressure. Totally measurable, repeatable, scientific.

But push further, like I did to 17, and it starts feeling different. Your nervous system picks up signals so subtle that standard tests barely register them. It’s still biology, of course. Your brain and hands just got exquisitely tuned. But it also starts to feel like intuition kicking in, like your body knows things before your mind catches up.

These days I wonder if I could still hit 17 pages, or even find a real phone book anymore. Honestly, I suspect my touch perception is sharper now than it was in school, but only when I’m palpating actual people. Living tissue has tone, temperature, and tiny movements. A lifeless hair under paper? I might not do nearly as well.

All those years of adjusting real spines have rewired my hands to read subtle shifts in tissue tension and motion in ways that go beyond what that old drill could measure. You lay your fingers on someone and sometimes you just know something’s off, long before imaging confirms it. The line between hard-won skill and that quiet inner sense gets beautifully blurry.