What can you learn by tickling a bunch of rats? Turns out, quite a lot.
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. (Related: "Do Animals Laugh? Tickle Experiments Suggest They Do.")
“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
