Ever wondered why you burst out laughing when tickled by others, but are usually unable to tickle yourself? Here’s the explanation!
If you just hold a feather, for example, and tickle yourself directly it’s not very ticklish and if someone else does it to you it is very ticklish. But you can do things in between: when someone else tickles you, you can’t predict perfectly when that sensory information is going to arrive. But when you tickle yourself you can predict with great accuracy the precise timing and magnitude of those sensations and we believe there are predictive mechanisms that cancel or attenuate the sensory information that is being produced by yourself. And it is a rather precise mechanism. All of these little things increase the ticklishness that you experience so as you break down the relationship between what your doing and the consequences of your actions then it becomes more difficult to predict and therefore more difficult to cancel the sensory information that is coming in.
