Everyone knows that you can't tickle yourself – at least, not in the conventional sense. But why is this the case?
The main reason why it's impossible to tickle yourself is because your nervous system is designed in a way which doesn't allow this to take place.
A recent experiment,conducted at Monash University, Australia, showed that it is possible to trick people into thinking they are tickling themselves when they are actually being tickled by someone else. The study revealed that when an individual was under the impression that they were tickling themselves, they became significantly less aroused than when they were not being tickled at all.
The experiment was led by Jakob Hohwy, a professor of philosophy at Monash University. In a press release issued by Monash Media on April 9, 2015, Hohwy was quoted as saying: "It's remarkable just how strong our conviction is that we can feel an itch when we are the one who causes it.
1 Hohwy's findings show that most people simply don't understand the workings of their nervous systems.
We tend to believe that our bodies always respond in the same way in response to certain stimuli, but in fact this is not always the case.Researchers found that
people's expectations often play a large role in how they perceive pain and their levels of arousal. For example, when a person feels a painful stimulus and believes that it is coming from outside of their body, the sensation will be perceived more intensely than if the person believed that they caused the pain.
2 A subsequent experiment led by Klaus Katz and Melzack, found that a person's beliefs about the cause of pain could influence the intensity of that pain.
If an individual believed that he or she had caused the pain, the painful sensation was found to be more intense than if a person believed they had not caused the pain or believed it to be caused by another person.
3 Bentham thinks that proximity has an independent role in affecting decision-making. According to his theory of utilitarianism, greater proximity to an action or intention increases the likelihood of that action occurring (and vice versa). Therefore, if an action is potentially painful to us, then it is usually best for us to perform the action as close to our body as possible.
4 Bentham's hedonic calculus was a method he used to objectively measure the value of an action or object based on how pleasurable or unpleasant the experience is perceived to be.
It is based on the idea that pleasure and pain are both subjective sensations and that we perceive them in different ways. While one person may experience something as mildly pleasant while another may view it as completely painful, each individual has their own threshold of tolerance. Bentham believed that pleasure and pain should be measured on a "hedonometer", a scale based on relative weights assigned to different pleasures and pains. His theory is that one pleasure will always outweigh another and therefore we should assign higher values to more enjoyable experiences, and lower values to those that we dislike.