Rats Love Being Tickled Too, But Only When They Are In A Good Mood, Says New Study

For all three of you always sweating your brains out wondering whether or not rats love being tickled, scientists may finally have an answer. But before we delve deeper, let us take a moment to appreciate how mysteriously weird tickling, arguably the cutest form of torture, really is.

If you come to think about it, tickling is nothing but a specialized form of touch that forces many of us to lose to an uncontrollable fit of shriek and grasping laughter that finally ends with desperate pleas for mercy. We all grow familiar with our ticklish-self from a pretty young age, yet we do not fully understand how it works even today.

Several decades ago, the scientific community grew interested in learning about ticklish behavior in animals other than humans. During their pursuit of a deeper insight into the driving force behind tickling, it was discovered that rats share more or less the same level of susceptibility to tickling as humans do, reports the Scientific American.

Following up on those findings, a new study has emerged now that claims to have figured out what exactly happens inside a rat's brain when it is being tickled.

The study, conducted by the researchers at the Humboldt University of Berlin, involved lots of tickling and playing with rats under varied circumstances during which the brain activities of the rats were recorded. As the researchers analyzed the data, they were able to identify a specific area of the brain that they think plays a key role in determining how the rat would respond.

"We tickled and gently touched rats on different body parts and observed a variety of ultrasonic vocalizations [USVs]," the researchers wrote in the journal Science.

However, the researchers also noticed that there was a catch. That tickle-sensitive part of the brain seemed to have only activated in happy rats. The anxious rats, on the other hand, did not respond at all to the tickling and playing. Weirder even, the rats that responded to tickling almost always made the same high-pitched "giggles" as humans, albeit at a sound frequency inaudible to our ears.

"The observation that the somatosensory cortex is involved in the generation of tickling responses suggests that this area might be more closely involved in emotional processing than previously thought," the researchers wrote.

"Identification of the neural correlates of ticklishness will allow us to frame questions about tickling in neural terms and thus help us to understand this mysterious sensation."