We can only imagine the looks on the faces of scientists in the room when someone said, “Hey, let’s tickle rats, and see what happens!”
Tickle them they did, and with the help of special equipment, heard them laugh.
Of course, there was an excellent reason for all the fun, and that was to get an idea of how mammalian brains process tickling.
Previous studies of tickling in people reveal a mosaic of brain regions that orchestrate the tickle response. One of these regions, the somatosensory cortex, was thought to merely process the sensation of being tickled, but not trigger the laughter that follows. The new work, published today in Science, “shows for the first time that laughter can be elicited by stimulation” in that region, rather than through traditional emotional circuitry, says Elise Wattendorf, a neuroscientist at the University of Fribourg in Germany who was not involved in the research.
Frankly, though, we’d much rather be tickled anywhere other than in the brain. The rats in the experiment had to first be trained to enjoy it, rather than fear a huge hand coming at them, but in the end, they even jumped for joy.
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