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Answer: "The leading theory holds that tickling provokes laughter thanks to a prediction error by the brain. An unpredictable touch confuses it, sending it int

Answer: "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." -- 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.

raldi 4y ago
This is the best kind of comment.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
akrakesh 4y ago
Now imagine if all such fluffy articles posted on HN have such a gist; how much time and sanity it could save. https://hngists.com https://hngists.com is my 15-year-old nephew's attempt to do it. It would be great if you could post your comment there.
- Andrex 4y ago
  I'm sure this is useful to some, but I come to HN more for longer-form articles these days. 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.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  There's no reason to use another website. This one works quite nicely.
  - akrakesh 4y ago
    An advantage of hngists: you can read all the gists of all the 30 articles on the same page without navigating to a separate article page—a few clicks and a few minutes could be saved per visit.
omwow 4y ago
I’ve always wondered about this! That being said, the answer provided still seems somewhat of a “here’s our best guess”—of course this can be said about most answers, but this just seems particularly far on the “just a good guess” side of the spectrum, rather than a more substantiated theory.
schoen 4y ago
One thing that makes me unsure about this theory is that I have the impression that tickling largely only works when the touch seems to have been volitionally initiated by a being we see as animate. I don't feel like it works the same way with a surprising touch from an inanimate object, or even a plant, even though that wasn't initiated or expected by ourselves. Do other people not have this difference?
- Out_of_Characte 4y ago
  How much of that is due to how complex tickling someone is? Any repetition and you'll get used to it. Theres also that study proving even rats can get tickled. Which gets me wondering if crustaceans can get tickled as well.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    > Any repetition and you'll get used to it. 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.
    - Archelaos 4y ago
      Wikipedia is sceptical about that: "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_Anecdotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_torture#Historical_Anec...
Bancakes 4y ago
kleiba 4y ago
Also known as the "cooking recipe on the internet effect", where all you really care about is the ingredients and assembly instructions, but you first have to go throught pages and pages of text on how the author feels in the autumn when the sun hits the colorful leaves through the morning fog, creating this light and mysterious glitter that inspired her to create this recipe which, if we're honest, really is just the n-th variation of some well established dish that people have been making more or less like that for generations but which now has received so much more value by a proper classification into the author's internal system of emotions and motivations.
- pluijzer 4y ago
  Don't forget the obligatory google spam; 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.
  - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    On the one hand, I love my "New Best Recipe" cookbook, that has several paragraphs on the particular variety, whether it should be crunchy or soft, regional variations, common errors and the types of flaws they cause, and the science/chemistry involved. I would much rather read a cookbook/recipe website with that information than without it. 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...
- fvold 4y ago
  This is done for copyright reasons. 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!
rob74 4y ago
Er... maybe I'm being dense, but doesn't the second paragraph describe exactly the same thing as the first, just in a more complicated way? (1): touching yourself is predictable, so only unpredictable touches cause tickling; (2): when you touch yourself, there is an inhibition mechanism that prevents your own touches from tickling you, so only unpredictable touches cause tickling. Both phrases actually state that your brain, your nervous system, whatever, can differentiate between your own touches and someone else's (or even touching inanimate objects, think spiderwebs) and has a way to ignore your own.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  One is stronger than the other. All self-touches are predictable. But not all predictable touches are self-touches. For instance, someone else could “tickle” you in a consistent and repeated pattern and it would be predictable.
helloworld11 4y ago
Curiously, both of those theories above could be true at the same time: Your brain suffers prediction error or simply unexpected touch error that causes you to go into a little frenzy of laughter and wriggling at the sensation, so in response it developed a body-wide message response that says "self touching coming up, take it in stride", specifically because we all need to touch ourselves all the time and can't afford to suffer the tickling caused by light, sudden touching.
greenhearth 4y ago
> I'm pretty grumpy about reading long, long, loooong articles Why, what else you have to do that's so important? I enjoyed reading the history and the current state of this fascinating subject.
- emmanueloga_ 4y ago
  true, every one of my activities are just (very modest) contributions to the heat death of the universe, but even so... with such a straight forward title I'd rather have a direct answer for long-form lovers, why can't we have both? :-/

raldi 4y ago

This is the best kind of comment.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

akrakesh 4y ago

Now imagine if all such fluffy articles posted on HN have such a gist; how much time and sanity it could save. https://hngists.com https://hngists.com is my 15-year-old nephew's attempt to do it. It would be great if you could post your comment there.

Andrex 4y ago
I'm sure this is useful to some, but I come to HN more for longer-form articles these days. 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.
Arnavion 4y ago
There's no reason to use another website. This one works quite nicely.
- akrakesh 4y ago
  An advantage of hngists: you can read all the gists of all the 30 articles on the same page without navigating to a separate article page—a few clicks and a few minutes could be saved per visit.

omwow 4y ago

I’ve always wondered about this! That being said, the answer provided still seems somewhat of a “here’s our best guess”—of course this can be said about most answers, but this just seems particularly far on the “just a good guess” side of the spectrum, rather than a more substantiated theory.

schoen 4y ago

One thing that makes me unsure about this theory is that I have the impression that tickling largely only works when the touch seems to have been volitionally initiated by a being we see as animate. I don't feel like it works the same way with a surprising touch from an inanimate object, or even a plant, even though that wasn't initiated or expected by ourselves. Do other people not have this difference?

Out_of_Characte 4y ago
How much of that is due to how complex tickling someone is? Any repetition and you'll get used to it. Theres also that study proving even rats can get tickled. Which gets me wondering if crustaceans can get tickled as well.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  > Any repetition and you'll get used to it. 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.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    Wikipedia is sceptical about that: "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_Anecdotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_torture#Historical_Anec...

Bancakes 4y ago

kleiba 4y ago

Also known as the "cooking recipe on the internet effect", where all you really care about is the ingredients and assembly instructions, but you first have to go throught pages and pages of text on how the author feels in the autumn when the sun hits the colorful leaves through the morning fog, creating this light and mysterious glitter that inspired her to create this recipe which, if we're honest, really is just the n-th variation of some well established dish that people have been making more or less like that for generations but which now has received so much more value by a proper classification into the author's internal system of emotions and motivations.

pluijzer 4y ago
Don't forget the obligatory google spam; 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.
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  On the one hand, I love my "New Best Recipe" cookbook, that has several paragraphs on the particular variety, whether it should be crunchy or soft, regional variations, common errors and the types of flaws they cause, and the science/chemistry involved. I would much rather read a cookbook/recipe website with that information than without it. 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...
fvold 4y ago
This is done for copyright reasons. 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!

rob74 4y ago

Er... maybe I'm being dense, but doesn't the second paragraph describe exactly the same thing as the first, just in a more complicated way? (1): touching yourself is predictable, so only unpredictable touches cause tickling; (2): when you touch yourself, there is an inhibition mechanism that prevents your own touches from tickling you, so only unpredictable touches cause tickling. Both phrases actually state that your brain, your nervous system, whatever, can differentiate between your own touches and someone else's (or even touching inanimate objects, think spiderwebs) and has a way to ignore your own.

zarzavat 4y ago
One is stronger than the other. All self-touches are predictable. But not all predictable touches are self-touches. For instance, someone else could “tickle” you in a consistent and repeated pattern and it would be predictable.

helloworld11 4y ago

Curiously, both of those theories above could be true at the same time: Your brain suffers prediction error or simply unexpected touch error that causes you to go into a little frenzy of laughter and wriggling at the sensation, so in response it developed a body-wide message response that says "self touching coming up, take it in stride", specifically because we all need to touch ourselves all the time and can't afford to suffer the tickling caused by light, sudden touching.

greenhearth 4y ago

> I'm pretty grumpy about reading long, long, loooong articles Why, what else you have to do that's so important? I enjoyed reading the history and the current state of this fascinating subject.

emmanueloga_ 4y ago
true, every one of my activities are just (very modest) contributions to the heat death of the universe, but even so... with such a straight forward title I'd rather have a direct answer for long-form lovers, why can't we have both? :-/