• Question: Why do we laugh when we\'re tickled??? :D

    Asked by niamh2 to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      This makes me laugh just thinking about being tickled! I don’t know much about this but I think it’s the surprise element. You can’t tickle yourself, because you can’t catch yourself by surprise!

    • Photo: Steve Roser

      Steve Roser answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      OK I admit it. I know nothing about this so I headed down the wikipedia path. The funniest thing that I found was the experiments described using a tickling robot. If you try and tickle your own armpits, it doesn’t work, somehow your brain knows it is not someone else, but what about a tickling robot that you can control with a joystick? Does your brain know this? And it turns out (as usual) that brains are very clever and robo-tickling doesn’t work either. Otherwise, I point you to here with profound apologies for cheating….

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Ha, ha – great question. I have no idea! I did tease my children with tickling when they were younger (and they would tickle me back). But I don’t know why it makes you laugh, especially when you are usually desperate for the tickler to stop! I have heard that it is not possible to make yourself laugh by tickling, so there must be a psychological component to it.

      I am so far out of my depth here… 😉

    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I don’t know the answer. I found some ideas on the internet, but they didn’t seem particularly persuasive, and I am not sure how you would test them with an experiment.

      One experiment I do no about looked why tickling yourself doesn’t work. Sarah Jayne Blakemore and collegues at UCL (I used to work in the same building!) compared a “tickle” produced unpredictably by a robot (ir had a kind of finger made of soft foam) with one which the person being tickled controlled (using the same tickler). Robot tickles were more rated more tickly, intense and pleasant than otherwise identical self-generated tickles. In a brain imaging experiment (fMRI) they showed that the during self generated tickles produced less activity in three parts of the brain, including the one that processes touch, and the cerebellum. This tied in with a theory that the brain automatically predicts and “discounts” sensations we get from our own planned actions – the cerebellum might be involved in this.

      So part of the explanation for tickles is that they have to be unexpected and external to generate the pleasurable sensation. But that doesn’t seem like the whole story. The best (in my view) explanation for laughing would be the idea that the response evolved to help parents bond with their children; this doesn’t seem very easy to test though.

Comments

  • Photo: Tom

    Tom commented on :

    Steve, is that the first time you cheated? I’ve been doing it all the time. Although students should know that we can’t see each others answers before we post them here. At least, I haven’t figured out how to yet. Honest 🙂