Why you can’t tickle yourself
wired.com
wired.com
"The leading theory holds that tickling provokes laughter thanks to a prediction error by the brain. An unpredictable touch confuses it, sending it into a mini frenzy. Self-touch is always predictable … so, no frenzy.
But Brecht thinks it’s not really about prediction. Instead, he suggests that as a person touches themselves, the brain sends out a body-wide message that inhibits touch sensitivity. “We think what is happening is the brain has a trick to know: As soon as you touch yourself, don’t listen,” he says. If it didn’t, he argues, we’d all be constantly tickling ourselves every time we scratched an armpit or touched our toes."
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The question was mildly interesting but I'm pretty grumpy about reading long, long, loooong articles that are supposed to answer N questions, where the answers are buried deep in some random location/s... :-p I guess this one is just around 4/5 pages or so, but the answer fits in just two paragraphs.
This change might have originated when I ditched programming as a career, or merely growing older. Dunno.
Language is so disposable these days (much of my received text messages are about 50% emoji now), I really respect someone who takes the time and effort to ply an interesting tome out of English.
Do other people not have this difference?
Tickling was a torture method in ancient Rome and people can die from it. So no, suspectable people don't get used to it. Not all people have the same sensitivity however, so I can imagine it was like that for you.
"An article in the British Medical Journal about European tortures describes a method of tickle torture in which a goat was compelled to lick the victim's feet because they had been dipped in salt water. Once the goat had licked the salt off, the victim's feet would be dipped in the salt water again and the process would repeat itself.[...] However, it remains unclear if this method was ever used in practice as it is only described in the 1502 Tractatus de indiciis et tortura by the Italian jurist and monk Franciscus Brunus de San Severino – a treatise that actually cautioned against torture in general – and while it seems clear that Franciscus Brunus had not made up this practice, the issue is left open whether the inclusion in the treatise is based on hearsay, (reliable) eye-witness accounts, or personal experience.[...] This uncertainty does not preclude this anecdote from being repeated in popular culture, for instance during a 2013 episode of the British satirical quiz show QI.[...]"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_torture#Historical_Anec...
FWIW, I find various massager devices to be tickle-inducing.
Did you ever feel the urge to bake cookies but didn't know what ingredients you need to bake cookies? Even Aristoteles knew of some ingredients for baking cookies. Yes that is right baking cookies, or baking biscuits like the British would say has a long history. No need to go to the shop when you have the recipe for baking cookies.... etc. etc.
On the other hand, Google apparently can't distinguish between quality content and auto-generated SEO filler drivel. It has to be auto-generated, right? No one could write that stuff by hand...
You can't copyright the raw list of ingredients, as it is a factual statement with too little creative input (in the list, not the recipe itself!) to get copyright protection.
To stop the recipe blog just being scraped by some recipe site and get zero visitors/impressions for themselves, they have these (at least) "minimally creative" intros that qualify for copyright.
...then the recipe sites just changed to extract the factual non-protected recipe from that, and the arms race escalates. "Whisk the eggs in with a feeling of freedom, and duty to the ancestors" - COPYRIGHT, BABY!
Coca Cola recipe isn’t copyrighted or trademarked. They went the third route “trade secret” and interestingly enough, the exact recipe they use is still secret, despite all the years it’s existed.
(Yes, some have approximated it though if memory serves)
Funny enough, it's just like tickling. You have to know that it's Coke to taste Coke. Drinking another brand that tastes identical to Coke in blind tests is like tickling yourself.
What other brand tastes like Coke? I guarantee I can blind taste identify most (all?) the common US brands of cola.
The specific wording and 'flourish' of recipes is copyrightable, but the actual factual, meaningful content - the one which impacts the 'success' of the recipe - fundamentally can't be restricted by copyright, you can't get an exclusive monopoly to make a particular concoction through copyright law (you can with patent law, but it has other restrictions).
It's similar to copyright on design for e.g. clothing - the arbitrary artistic parts can be protected with copyright, but the functional parts can not be restricted that way.
So if you know how to make Coca Cola and want to do that, copyright law won't protect that. Perhaps patent law might (I'm not certain) but there is no patent on the Coca Cola recipe - and if there was, the recipe would have to be published in the patent application, and it would expire in 20 years, unlike copyright. However, you could not freely say that it's exactly like Coca Cola (trademark laws would restrict that), and it does matter how you got that recipe - trade secrets are protected, and if you got the recipe through illegal means (e.g. breaking&entering, or bribing an employee) then you could have repercussions for that.
Sometimes it is useful for coding, where there is some refactoring done that helps you to understand the "why" of some changes.
But it clearly depends on the video. Many have the 20 useful seconds burrien in 4 minutes of BS.
On the other end of the spectrum, when I look for information about how to assemble a transmission (or similar) I instead find someone who has cut together some short video that doesn't actually contain good shots of the various assembly steps.
internet recipes are designed to be below 40min, if you look at the instructions. but for certain steps, developing the actual flavor would need to be longer - but „customers“ don’t want recipes that take longer.
so all produce a very limited taste range
Why, what else you have to do that's so important? I enjoyed reading the history and the current state of this fascinating subject.
for long-form lovers, why can't we have both? :-/
The hypothesis is that people with schizophrenia are less able to predict their internal sensations - and because tickling is so tightly coupled exciting our brains expectation and predictions - they experience it as if someone else is doing it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3808979/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17097347/
People with either are less likely to experience illusions. SlateStarCodex had a decent article that touched on the phenomenon a few years ago:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-pe...
i can tickle myself reliably and in a bunch of diff places but pretty sure i'm otherwise normal. not a schizo not an autist so idk why... or at least pretty sure i'm not (◕‿◕)
On the other hand, I've noticed a fair number of other strange reactions that I sometimes get to sensations that I've occasionally seen other people online mention but have never met anyone else in person who also says they have them. One weird one is that when certain things vibrate in my hand (e.g. some but not all of the cell phones I've had and my Nintendo Switch's "rumble"), my inner ear will feel like it's shaking around, which is very unsettling. It seems to happen on the opposite ear of the hand my phone is being held (or both ears if both hands are touching). I can also sometimes replicate it by tickling parts of my lower face (in which case it happens on the same side as the part of my face touched), which makes me think it's due to some sort of actual physiological response to some extent rather than just some sort of weird resonance). From googling this in the past, there do seem to be other people who experience this, but I couldn't find any sort of documented research on it (presumably due to it being rare and benign enough not to merit anyone's attention).
Source?
> As planned, Subject 1 couldn’t help but laugh. The fact that they couldn’t help it is what has drawn Michael Brecht, leader of the research group from Humboldt University, to the neuroscience of tickling and play. It’s funny, but it’s also deeply mysterious—and understudied.
People tend to come up with a variety of words to describe just the skin sensation when challenged on this (just scroll through other responses in this thread now that they've started responding), and "tickle" just seems to be a fallback when they don't think about it.
AFAIK, the light kind can be self-inflicted. The other can't.
> Feet rank the [most ticklish].
No way. The palate (roof of mouth) is just insanely ticklish. Be careful if doing it to a friend, because a reaction can be to bite. I would be pretty sure there are other places more ticklish than feet, but it is hard to do random sampling.
To most, tickling is a semi awful experience of uncontrollable laughter and pulling away from the source. To half the commenters here, it's just a funny feeling they can do to themselves.
That honestly made me wonder if some people were never tickled as a child. Which I can't say is a weird thing, either.
Aside from it never being attempted, I can confirm that some people can't be tickled. Two of my childhood friends were like this.
Humans can't tickle themselves? I can.
Humans think in pictures? I don't.
Humans don't remember the moment of their birth? I do. (Followed, of course, by "I thought this was normal").
Do people lie out of defiance, or to make themselves sound like special snowflakes, or what? Is there a term for this?
There are always exceptions to the rule in empirical studies and there's no better way to find them than making a general claim in a public forum.
It would be far more surprising if someone claimed the halting problem wasn't true for them (which someone did in fact claim on upwork or somesuch :)
I hope my interpretation's wrong here, that's a very closed-minded and sad way to live.
And to take it further - mirrors and shadows. If, out of the corner of your eye, you see yourself moving in a reflection or shadow, you can scare the shit out of yourself. Full-on primal fight or flight. But you can never do it deliberately. And I doubt you can do it more than once every few hours.
Tickling is a form of “play fighting”, except it is done with parents and sometimes friends. It is sometimes uncomfortable for the tickled but they giggle anyway - which encourages the tickler to keep going with the “attack”. If the ticked person had the “appropriate” response of pain, the attack would stop.
The tickled thus learns reflexes to defend against attacks in general, especially against an unfriendly human. I’d imagine that the ticklish trait evolved and imparted that population an advantage against populations that were not ticklish.
On the other hand, some good tinnitus results have been shown from "over stimulating" brain signals, including the thing where you snap the back of your head with your index finger.
So, could laughter/ ticking help in some way CS tinnitus? I'll try as soon as I'm with my wife. What if I get tickling for some long timeframe, could it have any effect on my tinnitus?
Next thing you (don't) know, your watch or wallet is gone.
That’s not predictive machinery at play?