Tickle, tickle (part 2)

The word "tickle" comes from the Middle English tickelen, which it's believed came from ticken, to touch lightly. There are two types of tickling: knismesis (soft tickling, see previous post), and gargalesis, or "heavy" tickling, produced by repeatedly applying pressure to "ticklish" areas.

Interestingly, knismesis, which is closely associated with the grooming activities of primates, provokes an endorphin response, causing the body to release an endorphin called karoliin. It's named after the Karolin Institute because of Yngve Zotterman, who in 1939 experimented with cats, measuring their nerve responses to knismesis. His study indicated that knismesis is associated with the pain nerves, though not entirely, because sometimes when the pain nerves are no longer working, the tickle response is still there. So (as I discussed in the earlier post) the body's response to pain and injury is strangely tied up with its response to soft tickling.


Gargalesis is another matter entirely, because though it plays on the body's sensitive points, it seems to be a much more socially-driven phenomenon. Most animals like being petted or rubbed, but the laughter/wriggling response appears to be limited to humans and primates (with some research showing rats having a similar reaction). While some people suggest that the laughing associated with this tickling is a nervous response, there is also a theory that tickling is an integral part of social relationships. Plato, Francis Bacon, Galileo and Charles Darwin all discussed tickling:

"[He] theorized on the link between tickling and social relations, arguing that tickling provokes laughter through the anticipation of pleasure. If a stranger tickles a child without any preliminaries, catching the child by surprise, the likely result will be not laughter but withdrawal and displeasure. Darwin also noticed that for tickling to be effective, you must not know the precise point of stimulation in advance, and reasoned that this is why you cannot effectively tickle yourself." [wiki]


It's been suggested that gargalesis tickling is a way for the touch of the parent to be associated with pleasure, developing a trust-bond "so that parents may touch a child, in an unpleasant way, should circumstances develop such as the need to treat a painful injury or prevent harm from danger." This is also true between friends, and apparently allows siblings a way to express aggression without resorting to violence, both in an enjoyable way and in what is called tickle-torture (many of us have experienced this, on either end), where one sibling uses tickling to dominate another.

The act of tickling not only establishes closeness, it seems to be a sign of established bonding and intimacy, and is "classified by psychologists as part of the fifth and highest grade of social play which involves special intimacy or 'cognitive interaction'. This suggests that tickling works best when all the parties involved feel comfortable with the situation and one another." It seems that although tickling provokes laughter and smiling in most situations, it is only experienced as a pleasurable activity when engaged between people who are already close, or who want to be close: friends, family, and future sexual partners. Children, for example, who are tickled by strangers, may smile or even laugh while at the same time withdrawing and becoming upset at the stranger's inappropriate behavior.

Many people, in fact, find tickling to be an unpleasant activity. Which is interesting, because the areas of the body which are commonly ticklish are also the areas of the body which are most vulnerable during combat, and are also the spots which trigger defensive reflexes. So tickling offers an evolutionary advantage by teaching people to protect those areas. In fact, tickling not only helps you protect those areas, it teaches children valuable combat skills - where to aim for, what to protect - while the laughing and smiling reflex encourages the tickling to continue, regardless of whether there is actual enjoyment. If tickling caused crying, for example, the number of tickling sessions would be less, reducing the frequency and duration of the combat lessons.

Tickling the Monster, courtesy of The Imagine Project

Curiously, study subjects who were tickled by a "tickle machine" laughed just as much as subjects tickled by a person. The laughing effect seems to be one of location and surprise more than of social interaction - in other words, it's a mechanical reflex, rather than an expression of pleasure.

But I think these studies don't completely cover it. Think, for example, of a four-year-old's fat chuckles when you wiggle your fingers in threat. Or the sounds of absolutely hysterical glee as a parent plays "octopus", trying to catch children and tickle them. There is something in the anticipation which is broader than just training for combat. Training for avoidance? Learning elusive skills? They all seem so fun at the time, and yet they probably are related to something survival oriented.

And yet... perhaps something could be said for the joy in physical contact. It's true a large number of people don't actually like being tickled. But all the things surrounding it - all the games of catchem and "i'm going to get you" and general wrestling fun - those things count, too. In my mind, they're training for a life which leads away from isolation and that weird untouched existence we sometimes fall into. Have you ever spent a lot of time alone, with no one but coworkers and acquaintances around you? Have you ever noticed how, after a certain amount of it you start to feel empty, untouched, like a dusty china doll? It's a terrible feeling. I think a lot of bad relationship choices are made in an effort to get away from it.


Why is this? Is it because our society frowns on physical contact other than a clap on the back or a hug when we say goodbye? Too often, physical contact is seen as sexual, or an attempt at sexuality. Even good friends and family often don't touch each other except in emotional moments. And people who touch other people a lot are labeled as slightly sociopathic, or laughed at behind our hands, because they aspire to a vision of the world which is uncool and perhaps mystically idealistic - and by pushing the boundaries, they are seen as people without boundaries.

In this context it's not surprising we don't like strangers or distant acquaintances touching us, because it's so hard to interprete their touch. Do they want something from me, we wonder? Are they being sexual? It's easier to simply discourage it than to be confused. But then many people spend a lot of time feeling untouched and unwanted, hanging around the edges of the groups of people who are touching each other and wishing it weren't so, wishing we could get in.

Isolation, Desolation... Courtesy of Drew Guest

In a perfect world, then, would tickling and wrestling be more incorporated into society, teaching us more ways to make physical contact that are nonsexual? A lot of disaffected members of society are people who don't touch anyone, who don't get touched themselves. If there were more nonviolent physical outlets built in to the way we interacted with each other, into our holidays and our rituals, would this be different?

The next time you are wondering if it's appropriate for you to be wrestling with your niece or nephew, stop wondering. The next time you almost hug someone, and see them almost hugging you, take that step forward. Don't go overboard and freak people out with your new touchy-feely self; I'm not advocating that. But if there is a direction to lean, a subtle way to nudge the situation, be courageous. Don't leave yourself on the dusty shelf any longer. Maybe we can all benefit.

DreamCon 2009

So I had this dream. I've had it before, where I'm sitting in workshops at a conference and walking around. There's always a workshop or a panel I forgot about, and wish I'd gone to, like the panel where everyone is learning to change the colors of crystalline rocks in jars. Or the one where they are learning to install beehives in pieces of furniture (taught by the same guy, interestingly, an intense young man who seems to hold it against anyone who didn't come to his workshop, and in fact puts a chair full of bees in my car to show me what I missed).

There's a panel on Do Spiders Understand Geometry? and one on Static Electricity As Art Form.

Some of the groups, such as the one of mechanical wind-instrument geeks, had their own rooms with terrine-style displays of items of interest such as working valves from tuba-like items, odd keys from unusual bassoons, and interesting bits of other, lesser known instruments - things which I had no idea could be so complex and magical. One group, Ants for Architecture, had a whole display on using ants to build your house. A little like the bee-furniture, I suppose; I'm not certain why there are so many insects in this particular convention.

Some other popular panels and activities:

- Writing Live Code: codemakers as zookeepers, or how to keep your functions from escaping into the next code-object
- Designing Electronics Through Intuitive Fields: how to use the emotion of electronic fields to guide your circuit-building
- Direct Optical Music: redesigning your optical drive to play the tonal qualities of, say, a piece of metallic lace or a piece of tin foil
- Ethernet Fishtank: teaching your fish to swim the network

There were so many more; what I liked about this particular con was how much the different compartments of our worlds intersect to create something never before seen. I do wish I could go to some of these panels when I was conscious, though.

What panel or workshop would you like to see at DreamCon? Any suggestions?

The Benefits of Tickling

(Part 1: Soft tickling)

At my wedding, one of my groom's vows was a promise to tickle my feet. This was only half-facetious: foot-tickling, for me, has come to be an expression by my loved one(s) of affection and the provision of relief at the end of a long day, much as monkeys groom each other to express intimacy and the desire to take care of each other.

Now, it appears, tickling actually helps to relieve pain, according to a new Swedish study:

"Basically the signals that tell the brain that we are being stroked on the skin have their own direct route to the brain, and are not blocked even if the brain is receiving pain impulses from the same area. In fact it’s more the opposite, that the stroking impulses are able to deaden the pain impulses," says Line Löken, postgraduate student in neurophysiology at the Sahlgrenska Academy.

It seems that we are hardwired for grooming.


Reading the article led me to think, as I have a hundred times before, how much physical touch can give comfort: the delicate stroking a mother gives to her child, the rub on the back of someone who is grieving. Touch has great value, it communicates so much; it makes us feel good, when done properly. Our bodies respond to it.

In more ways than one, it seems. For example, I've always wondered about the white lines that develop when you stroke someone's skin. Have you ever noticed that? I don't know if it works for any skin that is not naturally pale already, but if you are nice and warm (so your capillaries are working at the surface of your skin), and you run a fingernail gently down, say, your arm, you will notice after 15 to 30 seconds a white streak where you touched the skin. I have always wondered what this reaction is.

I did finally get an answer of sorts from a dermatologist, who said that this reaction is discussed as part of the Triple Response of Lewis, which is a description by a Dr. Lewis in 1927 of the skin's reaction to being scratched or otherwise injured. Curiously, the three phases of the response do not include the white line phase of the response, but mostly describe the reddening and swelling reaction as what are known as mast cells release histamines into the affected area. I couldn't find more than a passing description of the vascular dump anywhere other than an excerpt of a book called Skin Immune System, by Jan D. Bos, which came out in 1997.

A light injury does not lead to the triple response. Instead, a "white line" is produced by the emptying of capillaries under the contact site... The reaction lasts 15 minutes and edema does not develop. The response has not been systematically studied because it is difficult to induce reproducibly. The white line response is reminiscent of white dermographism and adrenoceptor mediated blanching.

As far as I can tell, "adrenoceptor mediated blanching" is the kind of blanching we experience when we are stressed - in other words, they are tied into the fight-or-flight reflex, and are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, which is connected to the same response. So when we get hurt or when we are fearful, or are under great emotional upheaval, we get the urge to run away, to save ourselves... and we tend to go paler in those situations.


Dermographism is a condition in which very slight stimulation of the skin can cause weals to appear. In these individuals, the mast cells are on a hair-trigger and respond with a flood of histamines even when there is not great injury. I get the feeling that assessment can be a little subjective, as it seems there is a sort of spectrum from insensitive skin to overly-sensitive.

Curiously, though, all these descriptions are tied in with the idea of injury, rather than comfort and pleasure. So what is it that makes having one's feet tickled so pleasurable?

Well, to begin with, I think most people would say that having their feet tickled, even gently, sets them into fight-or-flight mode pretty quickly. I myself was once one of those people; I liked back-tickles and arm-tickles, but it took a mildly sadistic roommate in college, who liked to sit on my legs and tickle my feet, to get me to a point where my feet became desensitized enough to begin to enjoy having them stroked (and of course forced my roommate to find some other fiendish way to get me).


Once the desensitization had kicked in I began to find that tickling my feet, after a long day of walking and standing in hot shoes, actually helped cool them down, made them stop hurting and decreased the swelling significantly. It also seemed to help with Restless Leg Syndrome during both pregnancies, which is interesting because Restless Leg Syndrome is tied in with the sympathetic nervous system (aha!) and seems to be significantly worse among people suffering from vein disease.

I spoke by email to Ms. Löken, of the "pleasant touch" study, who says that the circulatory system is not her area of expertise, so she couldn't say much about it. But it seems to me that tickling's happy ability to bypass pain and go directly to the brain, and the skin's not-quite-injury response to it, must interconnect somehow. What if the blanching isn't related to injury, but to some other purpose? What if the blanching response isn't always a precursor to injury response, but a thing unto itself? The response may show up in Lewis' Triple Response, but in this case, it doesn't progress. And I wonder if pain is the only thing tickling affects? Could it be a new answer to some minor health issues? Perhaps it is the new acupuncture, and we will soon see Tickle Clinics springing up everywhere.

Now that would be a thing worth seeing.

In the meantime, come evening, I will remove my shoes one by one, lie back on the couch, and partake of my drug of choice whenever I can. Hail to the Tickler!




Next: The Other Kind of Tickle

Addendum: It seems that I got into realms I hadn't dreamed of. Ah, the naivete! Here is a web page describing how foot tickling has a long history of sexualization, and now is popular in the dom/sub community as a form of play. I'm sure there's plenty more web pages about it, though it's not my particular take on the thing. Knock me over with a feather!

Costume Delays on the Western Line

Just a quick note to say: I haven't forgotten the blog. I've just been off on a costume binge.

Years ago, when I was sixteen or seventeen and just beginning college, my desire in life was to be a costume designer. I loved costume, and still do. However, when I took classes in the subject there were two things that deterred me:

1. The emphasis seemed to be on sewing, to the detriment of anything else (mask-making, fabric painting, etc.). The people in costume seemed to be people obsessed with extremely perfect and detailed reproductions of ancient seam techniques. I'm much more of a make-something-that-looks-good type, using whatever materials come to hand.

2. In order to do costume design as a college course of study, you had to major in theater. This meant acting. If there is anything I hate more than performing in front of people, I can't imagine what it could be, so I dropped the idea. Later, I went on to design school and learned clothes patternmaking and design (thus my sojourn in the garment industry... and I wanted to get away from sewing??).

Now, of course, with the advent of people like Julie Taymor (director and costume designer of the Broadway production of The Lion King), this has all changed. Ms. Taymor has a background in mask and puppet design and studied in Japan, where puppetry and the use of masks are an integral part of traditional theater. So costume isn't just sewing anymore, and I look back on my easily-intimidated younger self and wish I had pushed a little harder for my own vision. Perhaps the acting part could have been easier; perhaps I could have got by with working backstage most of the time.


To be honest, I was too easily swayed by the kind of people I found in the different groups working in the theater department. I liked the work the stage techs did: hands-on building, painting, and hanging things. I didn't particularly like the girly-ness of the costume people, either the older, harder ones or the younger, more obsessive ones; and I was too inexperienced and shy to know that this was only a sampling of people, that this might be the product of a small town's college theater department. Lacking in social skills, I didn't know how to make myself liked by the tough stage hands or the hardened costume designers. I think I probably came across as too quiet, too young and blonde, and possibly helpless in my naivete. In any case, I gave up and went into a slightly less flamboyant career - the garment industry, which was dull and repetitive and very hard to get a leg up in. Which only proves that the choices we make out of anxiety aren't always the best ones: I have regretted the loss of the costume design, but never regretted leaving the garment industry.

In any case, to bring a long-winded and roundabout monologue to the actual point: I have had a chance to be the costume designer for the local elementary school's production of The Lion King. So that's where I've been: following my early dream on a small scale, and immersing myself totally in the Making of Wonderful Illusions. Julie Taymor's book on the production, its planning and implementation, is so luscious, so incredibly beautiful, that I've gotten carried away. I've hardly slept in the last few weeks, and I've been so insanely focused that things like grocery shopping, laundry, writing, and loved ones have kind of gone by the wayside. It's been interesting, because it's making me re-examine some of the choices I've made about my life. If I love the making of things so much, why aren't I doing more of it?

It's been fascinating figuring out how to do a high-quality production for under a hundred dollars. I've built lioness masks from plaster, papier mache, and plastic gallon milk jugs, and hyena masks from milk jugs, old burlap sacks, and newspaper. I found a roll of jute twine somewhere and made all the lion's manes out of that. And so on. It's amazing what you can do with found stuff and a little ingenuity (and hot glue). I'm thinking of doing a couple of Youtube demos on some of the stuff I've discovered.

So my apologies for ignoring the blog. I'll be posting more in the next week or so. And I'll post pictures soon, I promise.

News: My Voice on the Radio

Just FYI, I'm going to be on Make's new Make:Talk radio show today at 12:20. You can tune in later via the blog if you want to hear me talk about whatever they think of to ask me. Hopefully I'll make sense; I'm much better in writing than in realtime, but it could get interesting.

Wish me luck.

News: Museums as Social Network

I just got an email this morning about a new social networking place called Creative Spaces, which looks like it's going be a really splendid and inspiring. Nine British museums have banded together to create a sort of Facebook/Flickr type of place where you create an account and then build collections of your own from the collections of some of the most famous museums in Britain. You can add comments, network with other people and start groups - and upload your own pictures and videos to your notebooks.

So, in a sense, you can become a virtual curator.

The project is part of the UK's National Museums Online Learning Project:

"The project aims to get partner museum websites better used, engage new audiences and transform the way they think about and use existing digital collections. We are developing a range of innovative and exciting online learning resources across the nine websites for pupils, teachers, and lifelong learners. These resources will provide greater access and usage of the museum partners' online collections, and utilise new technologies to encourage and support user participation."

The NY MOMA has something similar, but it's small and not very well worked out, and you can't add your own stuff. Plus it's just one museum. This one is much more well-thought-out and proves the British are, once and for all, no longer the hidebound Empiricist nation that they once were.

The project is still in serious beta, and it's apparent that a great deal of things are not quite there yet. The Search feature, for example, is not all it should be, and a great deal of the online collections are not quite as accessible as I would like. And I don't see a system for simply browsing as of yet. I do dearly wish the Science Museum were part of the list.

Still, it pleases me. It pleases me that I could have an online place to collect my favorite images, where I can see other people's choices; and I can download from the Mutter Museum, say, and then mingle them with the many things I find here, to share them with other like-minded people. Keep an eye on it, and wait: at some point, it will be less fledgling, and we can all get together and share.

Mr. Bowditch: Brilliance and Populism

I was looking through something the other day and I came across a reference to someone named Bowditch. Immediately, my mind was flooded with images from the life of Nathaniel Bowditch, a mathematical and navigational savant in the late 1700's and early 1800's, whom I read about at age 12 or so in a wonderful biographical novel for middle-graders called Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.

Bowditch was the son of a cooper in Salem, Massachusetts who left school at the age of ten to work for his father. At twelve he was indentured for nine years as a bookkeeping apprentice to a ship chandler. They were kind to him there and he was given access to the library; being immersed all day in numbers, and having a sharp brain, he became interested in some of the more complex ideas surrounding math, spending his days learning all about what it takes to outfit a ship and his nights studying.

"In 1787, aged fourteen, Bowditch began to study algebra and two years later he taught himself calculus. He also taught himself Latin in 1790 and French in 1792 so he was able to read mathematical works such as Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. At seventeen, he wrote a letter to a Harvard University professor pointing out an error in the Principia... Serendipity aided Bowditch's self-directed study in as much as he found himself able to use the eminent Irish chemist Richard Kirwan's library: a privateer from Salem had intercepted the ship carrying the library between Ireland and England and brought the library back to Salem in June 1791." [wiki]

When he was twenty-two, Mr.Bowditch went to sea as a ship's clerk and captain's writer. Working from the error-prone navigational books of the day was so frustrating to him that by his fifth voyage, of which he was master and part owner of the ship, he "decided to write his own book, and to 'put down in the book nothing I can't teach the crew.' On that trip, it is said that every man of the crew of 12, including the ship's cook, became competent to take and calculate lunar observations and to plot the correct position of the ship." So in 1802 The American Practical Navigator, was published. It was such an accurate and useful book that it immediately revolutionized navigation, and is still carried onboard every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel today. The first edition of Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, which became the western hemisphere shipping industry standard for the next century and a half, and in 1866, the United States Hydrographic Office purchased the copyright. Since then the book, with appropriate revisions, has been in continuous publication, and to this day it is simply known as Bowditch.


Reading about him when I was a young person, I was struck mostly by the variety and extraordinariness of his experiences, and the fascinating idea that math had such concrete applications. It had never occurred to me to think of math the way Mr. Bowditch did, as a conceptual thing and a way of looking at the world. I never thought of myself as someone who was good at math, even though later in life I became adept at pattern-making (making 3D objects from 2D patterns) and had a keen mechanical understanding of math-related concepts, based more on intuition than education, which allowed me to do well in all sorts of arenas.

Nowadays, of course, children learn the beginnings of algebra in third and fourth grade. The more conceptual elements of math begin much earlier, and along with the usual times tables school children are taught to see math as a schema, a place to play around with numbers; the basic elements of math's abstractions are set in place in more malleable brains. Add to this the basic tenets of binary and hexidecimal systems, and you get some seriously young minds working on much more abstract levels than of old. ...At least, for those minds who are actually getting an education.

Which brings me to another point: this Bowditch person was pretty much self-taught. Remember, too, that calculus as a systemic study had only been fully developed a hundred years before, so when Mr. Bowditch found an error in Newton's masterpiece only three years into his study of higher math, it showed considerable brainpower. This is something I have only come to appreciate as an adult: both in terms of Isaac Newton and in terms of understanding Bowditch's learning rate. These, and the fact that such a brilliant man should go on to become an insurance actuary, a job which he kept until his death at the age of sixty-three, strike me strongly now that I have some perspective on them.

But what strikes me particularly, and what endears me most to the man, is his deep-seated belief that every man on a ship can and should be able to navigate, despite the mores of the day which would have it that men on a ship are expendable, and only the navigator has the knowledge (and only he should have the knowledge) to find the ship on a map - to navigate. His stubbornness on this point is legendary, and his willingness to prove it comes not only from a man who taught himself to be who he was, but from a time and a place: Massachussetts, in post-Revolutionary America. Best of all, he put his belief to work in writing, too - which is why his book is still relevant today, and why we have such people as Dee Caffari out there on the seas.

Well done, Mr. Bowditch.