tickle me - not!

If you tickle a little kid long enough they will eventually start to cry. Perhaps tickling bridges some gap between pleasure and pain?

The fact that you can't tickle yourself makes me think that the response has something to do with a defense against an unexpected touch.

It is a curious response and I hope someone can come along who can enlighten us.

Interesting. What about those of use who aren't really ticklish?

Check out this link:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1339523

Interesting link, cavfancier, thanks!

It appears that I was kind of on the right track - but that bit about insects clears up some thinking.

My mom's not ticklish either, little k - she also has a very high tolerence to pain. She was having some problems with her foot and the doctor did an x-ray which revealed an old break. When the doctor asked her when that had happened she replied "I dunno...."

Hmmm, my pain threshold (for some types of pain) is fairly high as well. I've always wondered if my family had some sort of genetic nerve dullness.

Very interesting!

Makes sense that the very first tickling reaction is to push the tickling agent away.

I still don't get the laughing part of it, though. That article posits that it may be nervous laughter, but I don't laugh nervously when I think I see a snake in the woods. (Another evolved response, to always think a stick is a snake first, until closer observation proves it isn't.)

Other primates like to be tickled , it is possible a way mothers bond/entertain their children. Dian Fossey would tickle young gorillas as a way of getting close to them which has caused something of a problem as there are now adult gorillas in the Virunga Mountains of Rawanda that will chase people to get tickled.

Really??

Now , where else do we get this kind of useful information. ? Nowhere, Id say.


This one is so arcane that weve stumped the google ad box at the top

"Psychobiologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has been working with a male bonobo named Kanzi for several years now. "Kanzi showed an early and outstanding and spontaneous ability to master the meaning of lexigrams (word symbols or icons) on a computer keyboard, and after learning a number of lexigrams, he began to combine them to produce the occasional multiword message (such as 'Matata group room tickle,' in which he requested that his mother, Matata, be allowed to join in the tickling session in the group room). But even more impressive, as a youngster Kanzi began to comprehend a certain amount of spoken English, and by age five he was able to respond correctly to Savage-Rumbaugh's spoken requests and directives (Kanzi has even shown the ability to respond appropriately to some novel sentences the first time he heard them). Furthermore, it appears that as part of his spontaneous development of speech comprehension, Kanzi may have picked up a bit of English syntax. According to Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi's lexigrams-encoded messages to his human companions often have 'a primitive English word order'" (Campbell 2000). In addition to Washoe and Kanzi, a great number of other chimpanzees as well as the other ape species have been taught some sort of language, whether it is American Sign Language or a lexigrams-based language. There have been experiments conducted with all of these communicative means in which two individual apes "talked" to one another."

Google search on "tickling among primates" brought up a lot of useful info...

Savage-Rumbaugh is a primatologist a subfield of Physical Anthropology and a linguist which are two of the four divisions of Anthropology. I'm getting tired of psychology getting all the public credit for the work of anthropology.

Well, she is a self-described Psycho Biologist....I was really just trying to point out that there is information out there on the internet regarding the subject matter. However, I agree, the anthropolgists do need more credit.

Im not a psycho biologist or pongid anthropologist, IM GUMBY DAMMIT


Phacops rana

an immutable flexible field no doubt