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Why can’t you tickle yourself? And how come some people aren’t ticklish at all—while some on the autism spectrum are laughing more often?

Neuroscientist Konstantina Kilteni believes we should take tickling research more seriously—and she’s working with colleagues in a new tickle lab at Radboud University to get some answers.

Socrates wondered about this topic 2,000 years ago, and Charles Darwin racked his brains about it: what is a tickle, and why are we so sensitive to it?

“It is a complex interplay of motor, social, neurological, developmental, and evolutionary aspects,” says Kilteni, who says the subject is ‘under-researched’.

“If we know how tickling works at the brain level, it could provide a lot of insight into other topics in neuroscience.

“Tickling can strengthen the bond between parents and children, for instance. But how does the brain process ticklish stimuli and what is the relationship with the development of the nervous system? By investigating this, you can learn more about brain development in children.”

“We know that apes such as bonobos and gorillas respond to ticklish touches, and even rats have been observed being so. From an evolutionary perspective, what is the purpose of tickling? What do we get out of it?”

The fact that you cannot tickle yourself is also interesting from a scientific point of view: “Because we know when and where we are going to tickle ourselves, the brain can switch off the tickling reflex in advance. But we don’t know what exactly happens in our brain when we are tickled.”

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Kilteni argues that these questions have not yet been answered because it has not been clearly defined what tickling actually is within the scientific community. There is a difference between when you tickle someone hard on the armpits and tickling someone’s back or feet lightly with a feather. The first sensation is under-studied while we know much more about the second feather-like stimulation.

Working in her tickling lab with partners within the Donders Institute at the Radboud school in Gelderland, Netherlands, she argued these and other points in a scientific article published on May 23. They have also devised a way to compare people’s responses to tickling in a scientific way.

They created a chair with a plate that contains two holes in it. Study participants will place their feet through the holes where a mechanical stick will tickle their soles. That way, every tickle experiment is the same.

The neuroscientists record exactly what happens in the brain and also immediately checks all other physical reactions, such as heart rate, sweating, breathing, or laughter and screaming reactions.

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“By incorporating this method of tickling into a proper experiment, we can take tickling research seriously,” she said in a University media release. “Not only will we be able to truly understand tickling, but also our brains.”

Previous research has shown that people with autism spectrum disorder perceive touches as more ticklish than people without autism spectrum disorder. Investigating this difference could provide insight into differences in the brains of people on the spectrum.

It seems like children are more ticklish than adults, but maybe it’s just that the ‘real world’ conditioning has tamped down the childish mirth through the years. Maybe the experiments in the lab will spur people to be more inclined to tickle their loved ones—or tickle their own funny bone.

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