For the first time, scientists have pinpointed the area of the rat brain where ticklishness resides—the trunk of the somatosensory cortex, a region typically associated with touch.
They also observed that being open to tickling depends on mood: Stressed rats don’t respond to tickling by laughing, but happy ones do—just like people.
“Tickling is one of the most poorly understood forms of touch,” says study author Michael Brecht, a biologist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin.
For example, Brecht says we still don’t understand what function tickling in people may serve, why it causes us to laugh, or even why the best tickles come at the hands of others.
It may seem odd or frivolous to study the ticklishness of animals, but these interactions may well hold important secrets to human cognition.
You can read the full article : https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/rats-tickling-brains-moods/
