Pages

Sunday 20 July 2003

Why you can't tickle yourself

From a recent article in the New Scientist
Human brains are wired to underestimate the amount of force exerted on other people, a study of "tit-for-tat" experiments has revealed.

As well as qualifying the teary "she hit me harder" playground argument and explaining why we can't tickle ourselves, the discovery may provide insight into some self-delusional symptoms of schizophrenia.

...

When the body makes a movement a message is sent to the brain warning it what to expect. In this way, the brain predicts and already knows the outcome of an action before it is performed. This explains why you cannot tickle yourself - your brain already knows what to expect and de-sensitises the signal from your skin.

Wolpert says this may help to explain schizophrenic symptoms involving delusion of control. "Some schizophrenic people generate a movement but can't predict what is going to happen. They might claim the movements are generated by other beings, such as aliens, although they are made by themselves," he explains.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Anonymous commenters - please add a signature (doesn't have to be your real name) on each post of yours. Anne O'Namus, Norm D. Ploom, Angry from Kent, Demosthenes, or even your real initials, it doesn't matter.

Commenters are expected to be polite to each other, but the same standard doesn't apply to comments regarding me.

Australian commenters are very very strongly advised to publish anonymously. Sydney alone has more defamation actions than the entire USA and UK. Nearly double that of the UK in fact.

As Google does not reliably inform me that a comment has been posted, and I have no control over first publication, I assert that all comments are innocently disseminated under the NSW DEFAMATION ACT 2005 - SECT 32 and similar acts.