Tickling

Anya is very into tickling at the moment. She's loved it for a while but the enjoyment seems particularly intense right now--nothing is quite as fun as having someone tickle and poke her sides and armpits and tummy till she can't bear it.

It's interesting though, that until a certain age she simply had no "tickle reflex". You could flutter and poke on sides and armpits to your heart's content, but it would do nothing for her. And indeed, much of what passed for tickling until relatively recently wasn't, I think, a tactile experience: she'd shriek with laughter when I blew raspberries on her tummy or pretended to eat her feet, but I think the cue was aural or visual, rather than the sensation.

This absence of reflex is odd: newborns instinctively reach their hands out for balance when jogged, and hold their breath when submerged. But the same doesn't go for tickling, which seems as instinctive as anything I can think of. I guess it belongs in the same category of things as disgust, an instinctive-seeming response that is learned rather than innate. It's a reminder that the old dichotomy about animals being creatures of instinct and humans being creatures of reason doesn't tell the whole story: reason is often instinct tricked up in rational clothes, and instinctive responses often grow from a root of reason.

I got reading on the interminet about theories of tickling. The sensation is confined to primates (though some researcher has found evidence that rats may be ticklish), and there's actually two types: knismesis, the sense of an insect running across your skin; and the more pleasurable gargalesis, the one that makes you laugh. Awesome words!

Darwin thought gargalesis served some fundamental social function, noting that pleasurable tickling mostly occurs only between family members. A more recent researcher reckons its a form of play fighting, noting that "ticklish" parts of the body don't necessarily have most nerve endings (eg., the fingers and palms of the hands aren't ticklish) but do correspond to vulnerable parts of the body.

That reminds me of the tickle fights I would get into with my brother Robs as a kid. He's nine years older than me, so would always win, and we both understood these fights as basically mild and enjoyable violence: it was even nicknamed "biff and bop". This strikes me almost as like play-fighting among kittens: a genuine scrap, but one that's pleasurable rather than frightening.

One other thing Wikipedia taught me today: the Romans, supposedly, tortured people by tying them down, dipping their feet in salty water, and bringing in a goat in to lick it off their soles. That's horrible, I guess, but quite funny too, if it's not some nonsense dreamed up by Petronius.