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Q: What causes tickling? Why can't we tickle ourselves?

A: The reasons why people are ticklish may go back a long, long way. Tickling may have been one of the first ways early humans showed that they liked each other. It's a form of non-verbal communication. Also being ticklish let's you know if something is crawling on you.

[FutureWatch/Harvey Mudd College] A tickling session. In the laboratory setting, Panksepp lets the rats roam freely and does not hold them while tickling.

Darwin was the first to point out that a tickling victim squirms and strains to withdraw the tickled part, to get away from attacks on vulnerable areas such as the soles of the feet, armpits, belly and flank. If a fly settles on a horse's belly, the horse ripples his skin muscles as a tickled child squirms. But he doesn't laugh.

Children don't always either. "The child will laugh only--and this is the crux of the matter--when it perceives tickling as a mock attack, a caress in mildly aggressive disguise," says the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Tickling perception happens in the cerebral cortex, a higher-function part of the brain. The cerebellum, a primitive part of the brain, dampens the tickle sensation when you tickle yourself by telling the cortex to ignore the sensation, says Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, cognitive neuroscientist at London's Institute of Neurology, who has concluded a study of the matter and reported her findings in the November 1998 issue of Nature Neuroscience.

By the way, ours is not the only species that laughs and responds to tickling. Jaak Panksepp and Jeffrey Burgdorf, neuroscientists at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, just concluded a study of rats. "We tickle rats just the way you would a young child," says Panksepp in recent email. They chirp, kick their feet, and get excited--they're especially ticklish about the nape of the neck, he says.

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