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Where the brain tickles

15.11.2016

Obviously, tickling somehow affects the activity of the brain. Indeed, several zones in the brain are triggered at the same time, and first of all, the somatosensory cortex, which perceives touches on the body. But it is precisely laughter and other tickling emotions that, as it has been believed so far, arise in the emotional centers, while the somatosensory area should simply process the physical sensations of touch.

However, as experiments by researchers from the Institute of Biology at the Humboldt University of Berlin have shown, ticklish laughter can indeed arise, roughly speaking, only from physical sensations.

Shimpei Ishiyama and Michael Brecht tickled rats - it may seem strange, but now there is already quite a lot of evidence that rodents are able to feel and enjoy tickling: animals return to the place where they were tickled In order to get a portion of the same sensations again, the reward system responsible for the feeling of pleasure is activated in their brain, and in the behavior of rats there are all the same characteristic manifestations of positive emotions that can be observed in other animal species. In the experiment, young males were taught to play with a person who tickled their backs and stomachs during the games, so that in the end the rats even started chasing the experimenter's hand and tickling themselves.

Naturally, the games ended with the implantation of electrodes into the brain, with the help of which it was possible to monitor the activity of neurons in the somatosensory cortex and, at will, stimulate them with electrical discharges. And it quickly became clear that these neurons, which should have responded only to mechanical stimulation, continued to be "active" even when the rat ran after the hand that had just tickled her, squeaking in anticipation of a new portion of tickling. And even more surprising was the fact that artificial stimulation of nerve cells that respond to physical tickling causes the same emotional and behavioral signs as natural tickling - in particular, the rats squeaked in a special way, making sounds that meant pleasure and joy.

In other words, at the neurobiological level, the tickling response arose only from "mechanical" nerve impulses and without the participation of ordinary emotional neural circuits.

Along the way, it was possible to show that susceptibility to tickling depends on the emotional state: when rats were placed in an open place and illuminated with bright light - which was quite a stressful situation for them, nocturnal animals - they responded to tickling more weakly, and the activity of the corresponding cells in the brain was suppressed. .

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