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Tickle your own ribs. Nothing. A friend does the exact same move and you fall apart. Same fingers, same ribs. So what changed? ninebrains.app
Your Body

Why you can’t tickle yourself

Tickle your own ribs. Nothing. A friend does the exact same move and you fall apart. Same fingers, same ribs. So what changed?

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The aha, in writing

  1. Every time you move, your cerebellum predicts what the movement will feel like, and a touch that lands as predicted gets turned down.
  2. A friend’s fingers are a surprise: your brain cannot predict where or when they land, so nothing gets turned down.
  3. When a robot copied people’s own movement a fifth of a second late, their own touch felt about as ticklish as someone else’s.

Blakemore, Wolpert, Frith. Central cancellation of self-produced tickle sensation. Nature Neuroscience, 1998.

Blakemore, Frith, Wolpert. Spatio-temporal prediction modulates the perception of self-produced stimuli. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1999.

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