"The leading theory holds that tickling provokes laughter thanks to a prediction error by the brain. An unpredictable touch confuses it, sending it into a mini frenzy. Self-touch is always predictable … so, no frenzy.
But Brecht thinks it’s not really about prediction. Instead, he suggests that as a person touches themselves, the brain sends out a body-wide message that inhibits touch sensitivity. “We think what is happening is the brain has a trick to know: As soon as you touch yourself, don’t listen,” he says. If it didn’t, he argues, we’d all be constantly tickling ourselves every time we scratched an armpit or touched our toes."
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The question was mildly interesting but I'm pretty grumpy about reading long, long, loooong articles that are supposed to answer N questions, where the answers are buried deep in some random ___location/s... :-p I guess this one is just around 4/5 pages or so, but the answer fits in just two paragraphs.
Also known as the "cooking recipe on the internet effect", where all you really care about is the ingredients and assembly instructions, but you first have to go throught pages and pages of text on how the author feels in the autumn when the sun hits the colorful leaves through the morning fog, creating this light and mysterious glitter that inspired her to create this recipe which, if we're honest, really is just the n-th variation of some well established dish that people have been making more or less like that for generations but which now has received so much more value by a proper classification into the author's internal system of emotions and motivations.
Did you ever feel the urge to bake cookies but didn't know what ingredients you need to bake cookies? Even Aristoteles knew of some ingredients for baking cookies. Yes that is right baking cookies, or baking biscuits like the British would say has a long history. No need to go to the shop when you have the recipe for baking cookies.... etc. etc.
On the one hand, I love my "New Best Recipe" cookbook, that has several paragraphs on the particular variety, whether it should be crunchy or soft, regional variations, common errors and the types of flaws they cause, and the science/chemistry involved. I would much rather read a cookbook/recipe website with that information than without it.
On the other hand, Google apparently can't distinguish between quality content and auto-generated SEO filler drivel. It has to be auto-generated, right? No one could write that stuff by hand...
The same thing for me with YouTube videos. I don’t want to sit through 10 endless minutes of bullshit, self-promotion, and approximately 5931 cuts for that single answer to my question. Drives me insane that more and more content is provided as videos only, and all the inefficiency that must bring.
The rise of YouTube has certainly resulted in some simpler content becoming less usable. While installing a new thermostat, I googled "4 wire thermostat colors" a while back and got an onslaught of videos that were each several minutes in length. It's literally 4 pieces of information, that's it. It's made worse by Google promoting YouTube results, since it probably drives more ad revenue.
On the other end of the spectrum, when I look for information about how to assemble a transmission (or similar) I instead find someone who has cut together some short video that doesn't actually contain good shots of the various assembly steps.
Check the Sponsorblock extension for Firefox. It not only blocks sponsor segments but also has a „jump to highlight“ function which jumps directly to the answer of the (clickbait) video title.
Youtube results sometimes make sense. I use them when looking at some electronics setups because it is easier to understand the visual part (locating the connector etc.) than to guess though a written description (the connector is the black square that is next to the ventilator).
Sometimes it is useful for coding, where there is some refactoring done that helps you to understand the "why" of some changes.
But it clearly depends on the video. Many have the 20 useful seconds burrien in 4 minutes of BS.
You can't copyright the raw list of ingredients, as it is a factual statement with too little creative input (in the list, not the recipe itself!) to get copyright protection.
To stop the recipe blog just being scraped by some recipe site and get zero visitors/impressions for themselves, they have these (at least) "minimally creative" intros that qualify for copyright.
...then the recipe sites just changed to extract the factual non-protected recipe from that, and the arms race escalates.
"Whisk the eggs in with a feeling of freedom, and duty to the ancestors" - COPYRIGHT, BABY!
I doubt the connection between copyright and number of visitors/impressions. But of course it's clear that the intention is to provide some kind of "added value" by encapsulating the pure recipe in some narrative. It's just not what most people actually want.
IANAL, but aren't recipes copyrightable in general? Let's say I use the exact recipe for Coca Cola, isn't that punishable as well, if I didn't change it at least slightly?
The specific wording and 'flourish' of recipes is copyrightable, but the actual factual, meaningful content - the one which impacts the 'success' of the recipe - fundamentally can't be restricted by copyright, you can't get an exclusive monopoly to make a particular concoction through copyright law (you can with patent law, but it has other restrictions).
It's similar to copyright on design for e.g. clothing - the arbitrary artistic parts can be protected with copyright, but the functional parts can not be restricted that way.
So if you know how to make Coca Cola and want to do that, copyright law won't protect that. Perhaps patent law might (I'm not certain) but there is no patent on the Coca Cola recipe - and if there was, the recipe would have to be published in the patent application, and it would expire in 20 years, unlike copyright. However, you could not freely say that it's exactly like Coca Cola (trademark laws would restrict that), and it does matter how you got that recipe - trade secrets are protected, and if you got the recipe through illegal means (e.g. breaking&entering, or bribing an employee) then you could have repercussions for that.
Coca Cola recipe isn’t copyrighted or trademarked. They went the third route “trade secret” and interestingly enough, the exact recipe they use is still secret, despite all the years it’s existed.
(Yes, some have approximated it though if memory serves)
I'm guessing that several have recreated the exact taste of Coke, but due to brand conditioning, the image of the can prevents your brain from experiencing it the same way. At this point, Coke probably doesn't care if someone recreates their taste or exact recipe. Their unique branding, and common belief that the recipe is a mystery, makes people experience the drinking of a Coke as unique.
Funny enough, it's just like tickling. You have to know that it's Coke to taste Coke. Drinking another brand that tastes identical to Coke in blind tests is like tickling yourself.
I dunno, whichever ones do, or none of them even. I would be surprised if no one's been able to nail it even once. I just think that if you found one that tasted identical to Coke, it wouldn't matter.
I just read an article about AI and ethics in a national newspaper. 90% was about the researcher and not about the research. I really dislike human interest stories when expecting some more depth.
internet recipes are designed to be below 40min, if you look at the instructions. but for certain steps, developing the actual flavor would need to be longer - but „customers“ don’t want recipes that take longer.
I’ve always wondered about this! That being said, the answer provided still seems somewhat of a “here’s our best guess”—of course this can be said about most answers, but this just seems particularly far on the “just a good guess” side of the spectrum, rather than a more substantiated theory.
Er... maybe I'm being dense, but doesn't the second paragraph describe exactly the same thing as the first, just in a more complicated way? (1): touching yourself is predictable, so only unpredictable touches cause tickling; (2): when you touch yourself, there is an inhibition mechanism that prevents your own touches from tickling you, so only unpredictable touches cause tickling. Both phrases actually state that your brain, your nervous system, whatever, can differentiate between your own touches and someone else's (or even touching inanimate objects, think spiderwebs) and has a way to ignore your own.
One is stronger than the other. All self-touches are predictable. But not all predictable touches are self-touches. For instance, someone else could “tickle” you in a consistent and repeated pattern and it would be predictable.
Curiously, both of those theories above could be true at the same time: Your brain suffers prediction error or simply unexpected touch error that causes you to go into a little frenzy of laughter and wriggling at the sensation, so in response it developed a body-wide message response that says "self touching coming up, take it in stride", specifically because we all need to touch ourselves all the time and can't afford to suffer the tickling caused by light, sudden touching.
One thing that makes me unsure about this theory is that I have the impression that tickling largely only works when the touch seems to have been volitionally initiated by a being we see as animate. I don't feel like it works the same way with a surprising touch from an inanimate object, or even a plant, even though that wasn't initiated or expected by ourselves.
How much of that is due to how complex tickling someone is? Any repetition and you'll get used to it. Theres also that study proving even rats can get tickled. Which gets me wondering if crustaceans can get tickled as well.
Tickling was a torture method in ancient Rome and people can die from it. So no, suspectable people don't get used to it. Not all people have the same sensitivity however, so I can imagine it was like that for you.
"An article in the British Medical Journal about European tortures describes a method of tickle torture in which a goat was compelled to lick the victim's feet because they had been dipped in salt water. Once the goat had licked the salt off, the victim's feet would be dipped in the salt water again and the process would repeat itself.[...] However, it remains unclear if this method was ever used in practice as it is only described in the 1502 Tractatus de indiciis et tortura by the Italian jurist and monk Franciscus Brunus de San Severino – a treatise that actually cautioned against torture in general – and while it seems clear that Franciscus Brunus had not made up this practice, the issue is left open whether the inclusion in the treatise is based on hearsay, (reliable) eye-witness accounts, or personal experience.[...] This uncertainty does not preclude this anecdote from being repeated in popular culture, for instance during a 2013 episode of the British satirical quiz show QI.[...]"
Tickling is restricted to pretty specific areas that you naturally guard because you’re vulnerable. Are you really getting touch there by inanimate objects much?
FWIW, I find various massager devices to be tickle-inducing.
Now imagine if all such fluffy articles posted on HN have such a gist; how much time and sanity it could save. https://hngists.com is my 15-year-old nephew's attempt to do it. It would be great if you could post your comment there.
I'm sure this is useful to some, but I come to HN more for longer-form articles these days.
This change might have originated when I ditched programming as a career, or merely growing older. Dunno.
Language is so disposable these days (much of my received text messages are about 50% emoji now), I really respect someone who takes the time and effort to ply an interesting tome out of English.
An advantage of hngists: you can read all the gists of all the 30 articles on the same page without navigating to a separate article page—a few clicks and a few minutes could be saved per visit.
true, every one of my activities are just (very modest) contributions to the heat death of the universe, but even so... with such a straight forward title I'd rather have a direct answer
Interesting article, but I can 100% tickle my own feet. I don't understand why the fact of not being able to tickle yourself is repeated so often without being questioned.
It has been noticed that those with schizophrenia (not saying you have that) are able to tickle themselves.
The hypothesis is that people with schizophrenia are less able to predict their internal sensations - and because tickling is so tightly coupled exciting our brains expectation and predictions - they experience it as if someone else is doing it.
I can tickle myself in several spots on my upper back, and I definitely don't think it feels like someone else is doing it (and don't have trouble predicting it from what I can tell, although I guess I've never been tested on that rigorously). If anything, my expectation of it causes it to be even more overwhelming (it's not something that I enjoy at all honestly regardless of whether it's me or someone else doing it; the best comparison I can make to it is like accidentally shocking yourself when brushing your finger against the metal when plugging something into an outlet, just not as strong and localized to the tickled spot).
On the other hand, I've noticed a fair number of other strange reactions that I sometimes get to sensations that I've occasionally seen other people online mention but have never met anyone else in person who also says they have them. One weird one is that when certain things vibrate in my hand (e.g. some but not all of the cell phones I've had and my Nintendo Switch's "rumble"), my inner ear will feel like it's shaking around, which is very unsettling. It seems to happen on the opposite ear of the hand my phone is being held (or both ears if both hands are touching). I can also sometimes replicate it by tickling parts of my lower face (in which case it happens on the same side as the part of my face touched), which makes me think it's due to some sort of actual physiological response to some extent rather than just some sort of weird resonance). From googling this in the past, there do seem to be other people who experience this, but I couldn't find any sort of documented research on it (presumably due to it being rare and benign enough not to merit anyone's attention).
i can tickle myself reliably and in a bunch of diff places but pretty sure i'm otherwise normal. not a schizo not an autist so idk why... or at least pretty sure i'm not (◕‿◕)
My partner of a few years can do it and she couldn't be further from the representations in the literature or media (Sapolsky's lecture on it) that I've seen on schizophrenia; however, I'm not even remotely an expert in any of it.
ASD and schizophrenia share something in common: Both feature NMDA receptors functioning differently than in neurotypicals, which is a plausible cause for why some people are able to tickle themselves.
I used to be able to tickle my own feet a little bit when my skin was drier, but I can't any more. I don't have any of the symptoms in that NIH doc. Unsure if related but I also receive no effects from morphine regardless of dosage. Nobody has been able to tell me why.
Because this is basically bullshit. The title calls it neuroscience, but they're studying classical stimulus-response, just like Wundt. Then they come up with a theory that needlessly incorporates some neuro-stuff, which then is pronounced fact. If they would have done it properly, they would have noticed that you can tickle yourself. I'm pretty ticklish, and like you, I can also tickle myself under my own feet.
I somehow remember a thing about tickling being actually two mechanisms, biologically speaking. One is the light, very superficial tickling which only makes you smile, the other is the more intense kind which is able to induce full-on laughter. And they've both have very different evolutionnary hypothesis as to why they exist in modern humans.
AFAIK, the light kind can be self-inflicted. The other can't.
I'm able to sometimes but not always. Some research have been done on the subject, with various conclusions. One I remember reading about some time ago: "Individuals with pronounced schizotypal traits are particularly successful in tickling themselves" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...
I can tickle myself too and do it frequently. It always surprises me though. I can’t tickle myself intentionally. I can come very close! I can get the physical sensation, but not the tickle reaction that’s involuntary.
I am very curious - when you say that, do you mean that you get that same sensation on your skin as when someone else is tickling you, possibly with a need to scratch afterwards, or do you get the full laughing and avoidance response?
I get the skin surface sensation like I’ve brushed against something soft and delicate that isn’t my own intention, but it is my own body so I realize what’s happening processing the same moment. I don’t have a laugh response or the kind of abandon I remember in childhood being tickled. It’s like a shiver or goosebumps and a mental giggle when I realize what I did to me.
The laugh response is what the aricle/researchers and everyone else means when they say "you can't tickle yourself", I'm pretty sure most people don't realize this and are, like you, referring to just the skin sensation.
> As planned, Subject 1 couldn’t help but laugh. The fact that they couldn’t help it is what has drawn Michael Brecht, leader of the research group from Humboldt University, to the neuroscience of tickling and play. It’s funny, but it’s also deeply mysterious—and understudied.
People tend to come up with a variety of words to describe just the skin sensation when challenged on this (just scroll through other responses in this thread now that they've started responding), and "tickle" just seems to be a fallback when they don't think about it.
I can tickle my feet and I can tickle the ceiling of my mouth with my tongue. It's hard to explain but if you very slowly and gently drag the tongue through the ceiling of the mouth at least for me it triggers the tickling response the most consistent and reliable way. Article is complete bullshit.
Does it cause you to laugh and frantically try to move away from the tickling? My understanding is that that is what most people don't experience when they try to tickle themselves.
I wonder if you're more likely to tickle your feet because your feet are are the main part of your body that gets a strong touch from an external object consistently when walking. Maybe the same mechanism discussed sort of turns off or is muted for feet because of this?
I don't, even when it's other person. Actually it's a very annoying sensation, even infuriating. I don't recommend tickling me unless you want to be punched in the face.
The same for me. I have extremely ticklish feet (just as passing touch is enough), and while it’s not as bad when I tickle myself, I certainly can do it.
Most people (in my experience) can tickle themselves by touching the roof of their mouth - puts a spanner into some self-tickling theories.
> Feet rank the [most ticklish].
No way. The palate (roof of mouth) is just insanely ticklish. Be careful if doing it to a friend, because a reaction can be to bite. I would be pretty sure there are other places more ticklish than feet, but it is hard to do random sampling.
This comment chain seems to be people with differing definitions of tickling.
To most, tickling is a semi awful experience of uncontrollable laughter and pulling away from the source.
To half the commenters here, it's just a funny feeling they can do to themselves.
That honestly made me wonder if some people were never tickled as a child. Which I can't say is a weird thing, either.
I used to laugh from being tickled as a child, but I've trained myself not to react with laughter, as the lack of laughter seems to make people disinterested in tickling you.
Another phenomenon that I think is related - if you think you're alone, you can't prepare yourself to not be surprised if someone comes around a corner. You can tell yourself to pretend there is someone there, and logically it makes perfect sense that if someone really is there, it won't be a surprise. But you will always be startled if they are there.
And to take it further - mirrors and shadows. If, out of the corner of your eye, you see yourself moving in a reflection or shadow, you can scare the shit out of yourself. Full-on primal fight or flight. But you can never do it deliberately. And I doubt you can do it more than once every few hours.
My own theory (that may be shared but I don’t see posted here) is that tickling is a beneficial trait that evolved through evolution.
Tickling is a form of “play fighting”, except it is done with parents and sometimes friends. It is sometimes uncomfortable for the tickled but they giggle anyway - which encourages the tickler to keep going with the “attack”. If the ticked person had the “appropriate” response of pain, the attack would stop.
The tickled thus learns reflexes to defend against attacks in general, especially against an unfriendly human. I’d imagine that the ticklish trait evolved and imparted that population an advantage against populations that were not ticklish.
This article made me wonder... it has been shown that tinnitus has some remote relation with epilepsy and Parkinson. (It is theorized that tinnitus is the result of some uncontrolled firing of neurons in a specific region of the brain).
On the other hand, some good tinnitus results have been shown from "over stimulating" brain signals, including the thing where you snap the back of your head with your index finger.
So, could laughter/ ticking help in some way CS tinnitus? I'll try as soon as I'm with my wife. What if I get tickling for some long timeframe, could it have any effect on my tinnitus?
That's weird, I can tickle myself but am not at all ticklish when anybody else does it. This has always proved to be a kind of superpower when in a tickle fight. I've never looked into why.
You can, in fact, tickle yourself. Or at least I can tickle my feet with my fingernails or a feather or whatever and induce an involuntary jerking away from the source of the tickling. Perhaps I'm a unique specimen (my mother will be delighted that she was right all along).
The suppression of sensation or reaction to one's own touch is what pickpockets depend on. They basically trick you into ignoring a touch sensation because you think you're doing it to yourself.
Next thing you (don't) know, your watch or wallet is gone.
“But Brecht thinks it’s not really about prediction. Instead, he suggests that as a person touches themselves, the brain sends out a body-wide message that inhibits touch sensitivity.”
The crown of my head is VERY ticklish. Not by hands, but one time I got my hair shampooed professionally and I was so tickled by the water on my head that the roof of my mouth tingled.
