Science & tech · 2022
If someone tickles you, can tickling yourself at the same time make it feel less ticklish?
Yes—in a human experiment, participants felt less ticklish when they tickled themselves while someone else tickled them. Actually touching themselves reduced ticklishness more than making the self-tickling movement without contact. The abstract does not say how large the reduction was or who took part.
Details
Researchers studied human ticklishness using bodily responses, facial expressions, laughter recordings and participants’ own ratings. The central comparison was whether self-tickling at the same time reduced the ticklishness caused by someone else, and whether self-contact mattered.
Simultaneous self-tickling reduced externally caused ticklishness. Self-touch produced a stronger reduction than the movement alone without touch, so the finding is not simply that making a tickling motion has the same effect as touching yourself.
The authors suggest that the effect may reflect a broader dampening of sensory inputs that arrive at the same time. That is a proposed explanation, not an established mechanism. The abstract does not report the sample size, participant characteristics or the size of the reduction, which limits how precisely the result can be interpreted or generalized.
What do you think?
Good conversations begin with curiosity.
You can read comments without an account. Sign in to write.
Loading comments…