My son and I were riding home from a ballgame tonight and I showed him how the “horse bites the apple” by grabbing just above the knee on either side of the knee with thumb and forefinger and squeezing. It tickles and hurts a little too. It sure made him giggle. Then after trying it on himself he said. "It doesn’t work when I do it daddy, why doesn’t it tickle when I do it? " Well hell you know I couldn’t answer his question. So I thought I would pose this to the board and maybe learn something.
Mangeorge, I have been posting along side you for at least 6 or 7 months and I have never taken the time to say that you are always an informative and succinct poster. Sorry I haven’t said so before. Keep up all the good work and thanks.
i can do it. tickled myself just now. just gotta know where to poke i suppose. i’ve known others who can do it too.
maybe i’m just reeeaaaaalllly ticklish.
Tickling, while it makes you laugh, is a weird cousin to pain – it’s your body reacting to a stimulus by basically saying, “Whoa, something isn’t right here.”
Think about it. When you tickle someone, they don’t just take it. They reflexively squirm, and try to get away from the tickling.
When you attempt to tickle yourself, your body can compute the answer of what is causing the stimulus. Hence, no need to cause a reaction to try to get away from it.
Why does your body have a painful reaction to one stimulus and a laughing fit to another, when both are essentially trying to accomplish the same thing? Damned if I know.
I’ve got to believe that The Master has weighed in on this subject, but my luck with the search engine has never been all that great.
This is a belated reply, but I just finished the book * Laughter: a Scientific Investigation * by Dr. Robert Provine, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the U. of Md. He has a chapter in the book called “Ticklish Relations.” He states in the beginning of that chapter that you can no more tickle yourself to laughter than you can startle yourself. He says that it is a social interaction. He states later in the chapter “We can’t tickle ourselves.”
However, he later states that he was startled to find that his stroking the sole of his foot tickled. The tickle was particularly strong contralaterally (left foot with right hand and vice versa). Two days later, he conducted an experiment with 25 right-handed students. (There were only 4 left-handed, so he dismissed them.) The students confirmed his own finding. Contralateral stimulation to tickle more (4.2 rating) than ipsilateral stimulation (2.9 rating).
Dr. Provine explains this by our brain being less likely to recognize contralateral stimulation as self-produced. With contralateral tickle, information from the tickling hand and the tickled foot arrive at relatively different times because they ascend on different sides of the spinal cord and must cross the body midline an additional time to reach the comparator. The brain interprets greater arrival time disparity as more otherness.
However, as he pointed out, ipsilateral stimulation may also tickle.
>> One can stimulate oneself to orgasm, but not tickle oneself
One can stimulate oneself to orgasm? Would someone enlighten me and tell me the details? I’d like to try this.
I recently saw on PBS a program about this with Alan Alda which showed one can tickle oneself… well, sort of.
They built a machine which replicated the movement of the user’s hand and by using it like that he could not tickle himself. But if they built in a very small delay then he could. This tiny delay seemed to break the direct correlation in the brain between the cause and the effect.
I can. When I run my hand over certain areas on my back, or on my sides, i compulsively move away from my hand and the area tingles. It only works on those areas, though, and its not as tickless as when someone else does it. I’m not sure why though.
(This is purely a personal anecdote, so take it for what it’s worth)
I can tickle the hell out of the roof of my mouth with the tip of my tounge, so much so that I get shivers all over. And I can produce the same type of sensation by lightly running the index finger of my right hand between the fingers of my left hand. Again, this gives me allover shivers, that feeling of hair rising on my scalp, and curiously enough, a distinct tingling sensation in my teeth on the left side of my jaw. When I touch my right hand with my left, the effect is not as strong and there is no tingling in my teeth at all. I asked my dentist about that, but he couldn’t tell me why it happens.
This probably leaves more questions than answers, though. My apologies for not being able to help.
