Stuff You Should Know - How Tickling Works

Episode Date: February 23, 2011

What's the deal with tickling? Why does it make people laugh, and what's the science behind the reaction? Join Chuck and Josh and listen in as they demystify the curious practice known as tickling. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner, the residue-free, fast-drying solution especially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like stone, tile, laminate, vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?

They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, which makes this Stuff You Should Know. How's it going, Chuck?

It is great. How are you, sir? I'm fine. I can feel spring right around the corner and I'm getting a little excited. Yeah, you know, the Groundhog, Roscoe P. Coltrane? Is that the Georgia guy? No, that's General Lee, right? Yeah. Where is Roscoe, the one in Pennsylvania? No, that's Pawtucket Pete.

Oh, that's right. Puxitani Phil. Puxitani Phil. Pawtucket Pete. I think that's from my guy. That's just some crazy guy in Pawtucket. That's Pawtucket Pete. This is the best start ever. Yeah, it is, because none of this has anything to do with what we're fixing to talk about. Spring is around the corner. That just tickles me to death.

Oh, it's not. No, no. Have you heard, Chuck, of a guy named, and I'm sorry that I just shamed you on our podcast? It's a bad one. It wasn't that bad. I've heard way worse. Sure. We've listened to tech stuff. That's right. Have you heard of a guy named Robert Waller?

Sounds familiar, but I always say no and end up saying yes. It doesn't. No, you have not heard of this guy. Okay. I would be very surprised if you had. All right, let's hear it. Robert Waller in 1996 was a Walmart employee, a stalker, apparently, at the Fredericton New Brunswick Canada store. Okay. Okay.

1996, December, 1996 was a big month for a new toy that had just debuted called Tickle Me Elmo. And Robert Waller was about to find out the lengths that people would go to to get their hands on one of these. And December 14th during a Midnight Madness sale, apparently Walmart had sold out of these things, but that hadn't dissuaded customers from basically roving the Walmart impacts looking for them. Where is it? Exactly. Behind stuff, just knocking stuff over and they see Waller accepting a box of these from another

employee and they went after him. But really, he suffered. He was pulled under, trampled, the crotch was yanked out of his brand new jeans, he suffered a pulled hamstring. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up a second. They physically tore the crotch from his jeans. Trying to get to this, trying to get their hands on a Tickle Me Elmo. He's just rigged in them.

Exactly, yeah. But if there's like 300 people pulling in the same spot, it's pretty easy. They're strength in numbers. Okay. But so he was just swallowed by this pack of 300 people who were trying to get to these Tickle Me Elmos. He suffered injuries to his back, his jaw and his knee and he suffered a broken rib and a concussion. Not funny. No, it wasn't funny and we can assume that Mr. Waller, ironically, in the course of giving over these Tickle Me Elmos was in no way shape or form tickled.

No. And that he probably didn't laugh because as we know, tickling is related to laughter as anybody who has seen a Tickle Me Elmo knows. But have you stopped and wondered why we laugh when we tickle? I know you have. I have. Because you've asked me before. You said we should do this. You know, as a side note, I read this awesome article in The New Yorker last week about crowd trampling and crushes and crowd waves and stuff.

We should do a podcast on that. We talked about it in riot control, didn't we? Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting stuff and sad. I agree. And they wrote this one because of the Walmart incident last year at Black Friday. Somebody died at that one. Yep.

There's no Tickle Me Elmos. I couldn't use it. But I saw that in my research. Flat screen TVs, I think, were the culprit. That is so messed up. What is wrong with people? I don't know. And Black Friday deals, everybody knows they've gotten increasingly suckier in this economy.

Oh, man. All right. So that was a little sidetrack. Sorry about that, Josh. No, that was the intro. No, I mean my little New Yorker thing. Let's get back to tickling. Okay.

Because it's happier. Well, we have a question before us. Why do people laugh when we're tickled? This has been around for a very, very long time. People have pondered this kind of thing, right? Oh, yeah. Sir Francis Bacon said that you don't necessarily have to be in a good mood in the 17th century. Kevin Bacon?

Kevin Bacon was like, I'm neutral on this subject. And then Darwin was huge about tickling, he did a lot of studying of tickling. I didn't know that until I read this. He concluded that you have to be in a pretty good mood to be tickled, that you have to be in the right frame of mind. Because both tickling and laughter require a good mood. He was wrong, though. And tickling and laughter are linked.

What will get into that? But it's a question that very smart people have explored and failed to explain. And we're not going to explain it in this podcast, Chuck, we're just not. No. I wrote this, by the way, I want to apologize too. I wrote this within a couple months of getting here and I was just out to prove myself. And this is not my finest article. I confused myself when I went back and read parts of this.

Can I read a sentence aloud, written by your hand? Yeah. A gentle kiss can create physical arousal. So let's talk about what's the physiology of tickling. Is that what you wanted to do? Yeah, let's talk about touch. We all have millions of nerve endings, little tiny ones under our skin that tell our brain when touch is coming or something hot or something cold.

That's how it sends alerts, like get your hand off the stove, that kind of thing. Right, that's one of the ways we survive. Exactly. When they are stimulated by something like a light touch, which is called what? It's called Nismesis, K-N-I-S-M-E-S-I-S, and that's G. Stanley Hall. Yeah. And Arthur Allen, who in 1897 decided that there's really just two categories of tickles. Light tickling, right?

Like say by a feather, very light touch. And then heavy tickling, which by the way is the only one that can induce laughter, which is called garglesis. Garglesis. That's not a very good name for it. So a light touch, let's say it sends a message through the nervous system. It goes through a couple of regions in the brain, Josh, to help us along, called the somatosensory cortex.

And that analyzes touch and pressure. And then the interior, singulated cortex governs pleasant feelings. So you put touch and pleasant feelings together, and your brain is going to calculate tickle and laughter, maybe. Right. So there you go, the end. Well, that's the physiology of tickling as far as we know. And anybody who's actually paying attention to that little spiel,

your ears should have perked up because it's fairly incomplete. We gathered this information from the Wonder Machine. Yeah, fMRI. You and I both love the Wonder Machine, but we both know that humans aren't fully capable of using it to its full potential yet. And therefore, it doesn't fully prove anything. It just suggests everything. Let's just give a brief primer on the MRI, OK?

Right. It's a fancy machine that lights up and basically shows you what regions of the brain are activated when you're doing introducing certain stimuli. Right. And by activated, we mean that they're suddenly getting more oxygen supply via blood than they had before. So there's a correlation, but the MRI doesn't show causation, although a lot of people say, oh, well, the MRI shows this, so that's proof.

It's not. It shows causation, or correlation, not causation. It also correlated, in this case, why we can't self-tickle, because the cerebellum says, hey, body, your finger is approaching your armpit, and you know it's coming. And supposedly, if you know it's coming, you're not going to be tickled. And people as far back as Aristotle have wondered why, and he's supposed that, yeah, that's probably it.

Like, you know it's coming. The thing is, that doesn't fully explain it, because think about it like when somebody comes to you like, boy, boy, boy, boy. That even accentuates it. It totally does. But that doesn't mean that this is incorrect. The cerebellum is responsible for recognizing motion, not just in yourself, but in others.

So what they've found is, for some reason, just based on MRIs, when you're doing it to yourself, the cerebellum's less active. Basically, what they surmise is that your brain has judged that something totally insignificant is about to happen. So don't pay any attention to it. Let's just keep looking out for, you know, antelopes to jump on, or tigers that are coming at us. You know what that's called?

What? Sensory attenuation. Yes. And that's when the brain filters out, like you said, anything unnecessary. True that. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. The property is guilty. Exactly.

And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just, like, looting? Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jackmove, or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Make sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm finally diving into some of the most incredible conspiracy theories that have been pitched to me at Trump rallies. Like, did you know that Osama bin Laden is a guy named Tim? Yeah, we're doing a whole episode on that one. JFK Jr., coming back from the dead, that's an episode. The Deep State, that too. We're going way down the rabbit hole.

Listen to Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I wonder, though, I read this. I wonder if someone with Alien Hand Syndrome could tickle themselves. I would think wholeheartedly. Because your brain doesn't know what's going on. And why? Because of an accident, generally, with Alien Hand Syndrome.

Your brain isn't receiving the message that your arm is moving. Right, that's true. So I guess, yeah, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to tickle yourself. So I guess one thing, one idea that explains ticklishness, or the fact that we are ticklish, is supported or supports the idea, or the reason why we can't tickle ourselves. Because it's insignificant, right? And one idea why we are ticklish and why we tickle others is because it's a product of socialization. And a tool of it, too, right?

Right. You mean Darwin Hecker? Yes. Ewald Hecker with Darwin, like you said, they hooked up together and said you have to be in a good mood. But that's sort of been disproven. I'm not sure how they did these studies, though. They said that they would get people to watch stand-up comedy and get them laughing. And they found that they were no more likely to laugh when being tickled.

I don't know about that. Because if you're in a really bad mood and someone tries to tickle you, that's not working. No, that's not necessarily true. If you're tickled by means of a garglesis tickle, like, tickling or laughter is involuntary. If you're ticklish and somebody gets you in the right spot, you can not be in the right frame of mind and you'll still laugh and be ticklish. Yeah. Come here.

No, no, no. Well, think about it. If you were ticklish, Chuck. Okay, I can suppose that. Okay. I'm sure you've seen people being tickled before. Yeah, like if you're next being tickled, your shoulders draw up and your hands go up and you're trying to push the person off of you, right?

Yeah, or if someone goes at your armpit, you swat them away with a wax off. Exactly. Yeah. Well, one theory goes that we are basically taught that these are very vulnerable places in our bodies and that we need to protect them. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Like the neck, especially. Yeah, there's a lot of important junk in there.

Yeah, and it's not even tickling with the neck. If someone comes at your neck, your just natural response is to hunch up your shoulders and like grab their hand or something. Somebody comes at you with a judo chop. So this goes back to when we were cave people, right? In vulnerable spots in your body where you could bleed out, you want to protect. Now, this doesn't necessarily go toward that explanation, but what you're talking about being in caves.

Yeah. This is extremely ancient and that's proven or suggested by the fact that all great apes laugh when they tickle. Yeah. When they're tickled, right? Little bonobos. Yeah. And that's just that orangutans.

orangutans. Uh-huh. Pretty much all of the smarty pants primates, right, have the ability to laugh and they laugh in different ways, but basically what it is, it's a panting sound, right? Right. So that goes to show us that, you know, we diverged from apes 10 to 16 million years ago. If apes can laugh and we can laugh, that means we both came, we both laughing is older than that divergence.

Right. See what I'm saying? Yeah. Unless we evolved it naturally afterward, but that's less likely, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Then it occurring in such an ancient way. And that also, the idea that is even older than that divergence shows up in the fact that

rats laugh when they're tickled. Yeah. And that's so cute. Did you saw the video? I did see the video. Yeah. They studied, I'm sure more than one person has done this, but Jake Panskep of... Bowling Green State University.

That's right. It's from a brother one. Go Falcons. Go Falcons. They tickled rats and they found out they have a little chirp that is ultrasonic. Humans can't even hear it, but they were able to record this and not only do they chirp when tickled, but they have a similar reaction that you were talking about earlier, like a little kid.

Once they got used to the tickling, if you started coming at the little rat with your little fingers, they started chirping and wiggling around. They throw themselves in their back and wiggle in anticipation. And it's also, that same study in video suggests that it's play as well because when the person stopped tickling, he just put his hand in the cage and the rats would run after it in circles. Right. Wherever he moved his hand, they'd go after it like they wanted to play tickle.

See, that's a rat study I can get behind. Tickling rats. I'll do that all day long. Yes. So, let's talk about some of the parts of the body though because like the soles of the feet, let's say, you walk on these. Not exactly vulnerable. No.

Not vulnerable. You walk on these heavy plodding every day. You would think that a light tickle would tickle the feet and they do, but if you press a palm like really hard against the sole of your foot, it would not tickle. That's all true because of the Meissner's corpuscles. Corpuscles. Corpuscles. They're very, very sensitive and I get the indication that they're more sensitive than

other areas of the body. Right. The soles of the feet are loaded with these things. Yeah. Again, no one has any idea why in the fact that the soles of your feet, which aren't very vulnerable, especially pre-shoe, you know, we're pretty tough feet when there was such a thing as shoes, right? Yeah.

Yet the feet were still understandably ticklish probably. Sure. It kind of undermines that idea that it's socialization of the vulnerable parts of your body. Right. It doesn't make any sense. But that is why your feet, why you don't tickle, why your feet aren't tickled whenever you walk.

That'd be awesome. Because the pressure is different. What a world. It would be a much different world. Everyone would have like balloons and stuff. What I couldn't figure out though is how it's tied to laughter. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that and I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty.

Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a gender attack move or being robbed.

They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jordan Klepper, Daily Show contributor, Trump rally pass holder, and as of today, my most daring title yet, podcast host. This is Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy. An all new limited series podcast from the Daily Show. Now normally when I hear Trump supporters bring up these, let's just call them what

they are, 100% unverified banana gram conspiracy theories, we grab the sound bites, pack them in the segment for the Daily Show, and move on to the next person. I feel like cult is such a native word. We are not a cult. If you go online, there's a whole list of pedophile symbols. Really? Yes. What's on your back?

Q-Flex. Q and non. One of those crazy people. Now, we're doing it differently. We're only diving into some of the most incredible conspiracy theories that have been pitched to me at Trump rallies. Like did you know that Osama bin Laden is a guy named Tim? Yeah, we're doing a whole episode on that one.

JFK Jr., coming back from the dead, that's an episode. The Deep State, that too. We're going way down the rabbit hole. Listen to Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You want to know why you couldn't figure it out? Because it's not proven. No one has any idea.

Okay. We know that it's involuntary. We know that it's not related to mood. We know that not a light touch, that light touch that Nismises can actually, it can be arousing, or it can be annoying, like a fly buzzing on you. Yeah, and that doesn't cause laughter. Yeah, you see a horse or a cow like whacking flies off of their hind end. So that's why we have that touch, but it can also be arousing and it's considered a type

of tickle. It's a gargoylesis tickle that's laughter inducing, but we don't understand why. Another evolutionary biology theory is that it's a benign form of human conflict, so we can get our aggressions out without actually causing any hurt feelings, and the laughter shows that it's all fine and dandy and nobody's really upset. But that's undermined by the idea that you can really upset a person by tickling them for a prolonged period past the point where they don't want to be tickled any longer. They can be kind of upset as a younger brother.

You know this. Yeah, well, my sister actually, her husband, who was the boyfriend years ago, used to tickle her like crazy, and it got out of hand. She got angry. Tickle torture. Yeah, it's exactly what it was. Did you look at tickle jail? Tickle torture?

No, I didn't. You should. Is that a thing? I looked at tickle torture, which I always thought was like medieval. Apparently it's either Chinese tickle torture, Indian tickle torture, some exotic land tacked on to the front. Apparently it may have been used in medieval Europe as a form of torture. Bring up the feather.

Right. Nowadays, it's used as a form of torture in a very sexual way, at least as far as daily motion is concerned. But that kind of brings up something or it brings us back to Darwin. Darwin suggested that we tickle, and he probably has the most elegantly simple explanation. We tickle because we form social bonds. Yeah. If somebody, you don't know, tickles you, that's an attack.

If somebody you do know and you feel comfortable with tickles you. It's intimacy. It is. It's parental or sibling or the strengthening of bonds between sexual partners. Like you said, it's intimate. Interesting. Yeah. I wonder if the fact that we retreat or react because we're afraid of an attack, and if

it's the same with apes and rats, if that holds true for them as well. Like it's a benign attack for them? Yeah. Yeah, because they were talking about the apes like playing, like they do it during play. Right. And the rats seem to take it as play as well. Interesting.

But what that is useful for, we don't really know. Or maybe we do know we're looking too deeply into it. We should do one on laughter, period. Yes. Agreed. Man. All right, let's do one. Be a good one.

I guess the answer to the question then, Chuck, is we don't know why people laugh when tickled. That's disappointing. That's a little disappointing, but we'll come back to it when we do figure it out. Well, maybe we will one day. Okay. All right. So if you want to learn more about how we don't have any idea why we laugh when we tickle, you can read this really kind of bad article I wrote years back, and you can read it by

writing in laugh and tickle in the search bar at howstuffworks.com, which will bring up that article, and which brings up listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this kind of a mean thing to do, but sort of funny as well. Is it a Munchhausen's email? No. How to control a riot. This is from Eric with a K. Hey, guys, hello, stuff you should know, staff. Like we have a staff.

It's me, you, and Jerry, the two staff. Tesla and Picasso. I listened to how to control a riot and you spoke of mob mentality. It brought to mind a game that my friends and I used to play when I was in the Disney College program. Oh, yeah. So this is pretty good. Yeah.

If we were sitting around the apartment with nothing to do for the day, my group of friends would go into a Disney park until it was time to drink. So I guess you had pretty much free access to the Disney park during this college program. We would get 10 or more people together and stand in a line. The line would be in front of a wall or a fence away from any entrance or exit. It is really funny to see more and more people get in line behind the group of friends. The best part is when at the same time, the group just disperses at the same time, like the original people would just leave.

And all of a sudden those people standing in line were like, why are we standing by a wall? What was this here for? The befuddled look on their faces would really crack us up. I admit this is not the nicest thing in the world, wasting part of people's day at Disney. I still get a chuckle, though, when I think of it. It's funny to me now, you just go with the flow. I group this in with Face the Wrong Way and Elevator, which is something he does.

It's very off-putting. I edit this. You ever do that? Oh, yeah, I do it all the time. I don't do it to annoy people. I do it because I'm like talking to people. Oh, well, yeah. Sure.

But yeah, I don't just stand there like that. Like with strangers. Usually I kneecap people to do that. You guys are the greatest. This is Eric with a K. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Eric, for with a K. I look for your kneecapping if we're ever in an elevator together.

Or if you're standing by a wall and coming after you, buddy. Yes. If you have any stories about Disney, we want to hear about them, especially the gnarly seedy underbelly of Disney, like it's Disney Jail. Yeah, and I heard there's just a whole underground under the entire park. That's what the room is. Filled with mutants. Yeah.

Well, we want to hear your Disney stories. Just send us any heartwarming, heartfelt ones. We can just find those anywhere. Send us your seedy Disney stories in an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The HowStuffWorks iPhone app has arrived.

Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting?

Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political and social disruption and what we can learn from it.

I'm Tim O'Brien. Every week on Crash Course, I'm going to bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur, and I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.