LITTLE ROCK — In his 1984 essay “Laughter,” in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Donald W. Black points out that tickling is the only reflexive trigger for laughing; the others - “humor, incongruity, relief and sense of well-being” - are psychosomatic.
Before we have the cognition for any of those, tickling is the way our parents and caretakers induce laughing.
And yet, so many of us grow up to hate it.
“Saying that I hate getting tickled more than anything in the world,” says Molly Miller, who just celebrated her 24th birthday with peanut butter mousse cake and Miller Lites up at Town Pump in the Riverdale district of Little Rock, “would be a pretty accurate statement.”
(The following exchange took place over Facebook.)
ME: “Put it this way, if you suddenly learned you could tickle yourself, would you a) feel different and probably enjoy being tickled; b) experiment with self-tickling to confront your hatred/fear; c) ignore self-tickling altogether.”
MM: “I would probably keep accidentally tickling myself and just end up ... cranky all the time.”
ME: “So vile then is tickling ... that the gift of self-tickling would annoy you because you might ‘accidentally’ do the thing you hate. It would, for you, be the equivalent of stubbing your toe?”
MM: “It would be worse than stubbing your toe because there is no shame associated with stubbing your toe.” TICKLE ME, YO
That some of us feel shame or rage toward being tickled sounds like a How Come? better left to a trained psychologist, or a priest.
How come we can’t tickle ourselves? That’s straightforward enough.
A book that came out last month called Big Questions From Little People and Simple Answers From Great Minds includes this question and an answer from neuroscientist David Eagleman, himself a best-selling author.
First, how tickling works at all: “One of [the brain’s] main tasks is to try to make good guesses about what’s going to happen next” so we’re not constantly surprised by external stimuli. That is, while we’re busy getting on with our lives - eating our breakfasts, walking downstairs - our brains are continuously, subconsciously, thinking a step ahead.
Second, “because your brain is always predicting your own actions, and how your body will feel as a result, you cannot tickle yourself. Other people can tickle you because they can surprise you. You can’t predict what their tickling actions will be.”
In 2000, researchers at University College London put 16 volunteers into a magnetic resonance imaging machine, then asked them to tickle themselves. They also tickled them by robot. Brain scans of the two activities showed markedly less activity in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that manages motor control and physical reactions, before the robot tickling then the self-tickling. In other words, our brains were less able to anticipate the robot tickling, and so the subject’s delighted response was greater.
Then they did something more revealing still. They asked the volunteers to tickle themselves with the aid of the robot. When the robot’s response to human manipulation was delayed only by a few hundredths of a second, the volunteers didn’t respond much to the tickling. But, when the robot response was retarded further, by a degree greater than one-fifth of a second, volunteers responded as if tickled not by their own hand.
SURPRISE OR SOCIALIZE
In 1999, researchers at the University of California at San Diego rounded up 35 volunteers and subjected them to tickling, once by an experimenter and once by a machine.
Whereas the 2000 study meant to examine to what degree, if any, the brain is the culprit for our failure to self-tickle, this one was an attempt to resolve two competing theories about how tickling works.
For a long time, doctors, scientists and philosophers have split over tickling. Anthropologists and social scientists have long thought that it was inherently an interpersonal event. Tickling, they said, developed along with our earliest instincts to gather and commune. It’s social and evolutionary and no coincidence that tickling is most comfortable when performed by a caretaker or romantic partner; no coincidence that the places so often ticklish on our bodies are also the ones most vulnerable to injury in fight and flight - our sides and our necks; the soles of our feet and backs of our knees. The UCSD experiment suggests otherwise. Those test subjects responded as heartily to the “tickle machine” as they did to the human tickler, supporting the purely reflex camp.
Put another way, our desensitization to self-tickling helps us remain on the lookout for more threatening or important stimulation, such as a spider’s legs or a spear tip’s glance.
So, human interaction isn’t an essential component to tickling. That’s a relief, because what really feels good is slipping into our grease-stained sweatpants and thence into our Snuggies from whence we invite no - zero - touching, not the least from our other halves.
Style, Pages 27 on 11/27/2012