How to Tickle Someone

“Stop, start again, be surprising,” says Marina Davila-Ross, a professor at Britain’s University of Portsmouth who studies laughter and play. Unpredictability is the key element of tickling, which is why you cannot tickle yourself. Brains are prediction machines; if your own hand reaches in for a tickle, your brain will foresee and cancel out the results. (Research shows that some schizophrenics are able to tickle themselves because they don’t make the same distinctions between self and other.) 

From “How to Tickle Someone” by Malia Wollan for The New York Times Magazine; Illustration by The Untempered Prism

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