Tickling is a sensation that we have all experienced. Some of us love being tickled, but others absolutely hate it. Some of us are extremely ticklish, yet some of us barely feel a thing. The tickling experience is different for everyone, but I’ve always wondered, why can’t we tickle ourselves?

It’s all thanks to our brains! There are two important parts of your brain that control tickling, the somatosensory cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. The purpose of the somatosensory cortex is to process touch, which then sends a signal to the anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex then processes that touch and determine whether it was a pleasant feeling. According to Blakemore, a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, “both these regions are less active during self-tickling than they are during tickling performed by someone else, which helps to explains why it doesn’t feel tickly and pleasant when you tickle yourself.”

Another problem with tickling ourselves is that our brain is too smart for us! It can predict when we are going to touch ourselves and even if we try, we don’t feel the same things when we touch ourselves compared to when others tickle us. We can’t trick our brains! As Chris Gayomali states, “Your ‘unexpected’ touch, no matter how cleverly you disguise it, is almost always expected – and that’s largely a good thing.” Our brains need to be able to detect when someone else is touching you versus yourself. Imagine if every time you accidentally touched your leg, you freaked out because you though someone else was touching you.

Many scientists have attempted experiments in order to see if it is possible to fool our brain into tickling ourselves. Jennifer Windt, who works at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, gathered a group of expert lucid dreamers and performed her own studies. Because these lucid dreamers can control their own actions when they are dreaming, Windt had them attempt it, yet none of them could.

Another interesting experiment I found was one conducted by George Van Doorn, a psychologist at Federation University in Australia. As shown on the picture to the right, Van Doorn had a participant sit at one end of a rod, and an experimenter at the other. They both had foam at the end of the rods, and whenever one of them moved the rod, the foam would lightly stroke both of their left palms. The participant had on googles, which were connected to the camera on the experimenter’s helmet. The purpose of this was to create a “body-swap” illusion in which the participant would see from the experimenter’s perspective and feel as though it was the experimenter who was touching him or her. However, not even this worked. Van Doorn mentions, “The self-tickling lost out every time, even when including visual delays to make sure the brain wasn’t just adapting to the illusion.”

Because science is after all curiosity, there are many scientists who insist that there must be a way to trick the brain. After researching this topic, I did find that there is an exception to this theory. The answer is not yet crystal clear, but for some reason people who suffer from schizophrenia have the ability to tickle themselves. With the ongoing studies and increasing interest on this topic, I can’t wait to see what scientists discover in the near future!