Purpose of Tickling

[TempstofLaughtr]

Many of history's greatest thinkers have pondered the mysteries of the tickle response, including Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
, Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban King's Counsel , son of Nicholas Bacon by his second wife Anne Bacon, was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, and author....
, Galileo
Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was a Grand Duchy of Tuscany physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution....
and Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin Royal Society was an English people natural history who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolution over time from common descent, through the process he called natural selection....
. In The Assayer
The Assayer

The Assayer was a book published in Rome by Galileo Galilei in October 1623.This book was a sensation in Rome with its literary verve, its irony, its murderous wordplay, the poetry of its allegories and its boundless intellectual passion....
, Galileo philosophically examines tickling in the context of how we perceive reality:

When touched upon the soles of the feet, for example, or under the knee or armpit, it feels in addition to the common sensation of touch a sensation on which we have. imposed a special name, "tickling." This sensation belongs to us and not to the hand... A piece of paper or a feather drawn lightly over any part of our bodies performs intrinsically the same operations of moving and touching, but by touching the eye, the nose, or the upper lip it excites in us an almost intolerable titillation, even though elsewhere it is scarcely felt. This titillation belongs entirely to us and not to the feather; if the live and sensitive body were removed it would remain no more than a mere word.

Another view maintained is that tickling develops as a prenatal response and that the development of sensitive areas on the fetus helps to orient the fetus into favourable positions while in the womb.

It is unknown why certain people find areas of the body to be more ticklish than others; additionally, studies have shown that there is no significant difference in ticklishness between the gender
Gender

Gender comprises a range of differences between man and woman, extending from the biological to the social. Biologically, the male gender is defined by the presence of a Y-chromosome, and its absence in the female gender....
s. In 1924 J.C. Gregory proposed that the most ticklish places on the body were also those areas that were the most vulnerable during hand-to-hand combat
Combat

Combat, or fighting, is purposeful violence conflict intended to establish dominance over the opposition.The term "combat" typically refers to armed conflict between military forces in warfare, whereas the more general term "fighting" can refer to any violent conflict....
. He posited that ticklishness might confer an evolution
Evolution

In biology, evolution is change in the heritability trait of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. These changes are caused by a combination of three main processes: variation, reproduction, and selection....
ary advantage by enticing the individual to protect these areas. Consistent with this idea, University of Iowa
University of Iowa

The University of Iowa is a public university research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees....
psychiatrist, Donald W. Black observed that most ticklish spots are found in the same places as the protective reflex
ReFLEX

ReFLEX is a wireless protocol developed by Motorola which is used for two-way paging.The Motorola PageWriter released in 1996 was one of the first devices to use the ReFLEX network protocol....
es.

hybrid hypothesis, has suggested that tickling encourages the development of combat skills. Most tickling is done by parents, siblings and friends and is often a type of rough-and-tumble play, during which time children often develop valuable defensive and combat moves. Although people generally make movements to get away from, and report disliking, being tickled, laughter encourages the tickler to continue. If the facial expressions induced by tickle were less pleasant the tickler would be less likely to continue, thus diminishing the frequency of these valuable combat lessons.


To understand how much of the tickle response is dependent on the interpersonal relationship of the parties involved, Christenfeld
Nicholas Christenfeld

Nicholas Christenfeld is a professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. He first joined the department in 1991 and has been a full professor since 2003....
and Harris presented subjects with a "mechanical tickle machine". They found that the subjects laughed just as much when they believed they were being tickled by a machine as when they thought they were being tickled by a person. Harris goes on to suggest that the tickle response is reflex, similar to the startle reflex
Moro reflex

The Moro reflex, also known as the Startle reaction, is one of the infantile reflexes.It may be observed in incomplete form in premature birth after the 28th week of gestation, and is usually present in complete form by week 34 ....
, that is contingent upon the element of surprise.