You still can't tickle yourself, even if you swap bodies with another person

From Van Doorn et al, 2014.You wouldn't believe the amount of ink spilled by neuroscientists and psychologists attempting to explain the simple fact that we can't tickle ourselves. A popular, long-standing theory posits that the self-tickle failure occurs because of the way that the brain cancels out sensations caused by its own movements. To do this, so the theory states, the brain uses the motor command underlying a given action to make a prediction of the likely sensory consequences of that action. When incoming sensory information matches the prediction, it's recognised as self-generated and cancelled.If this explanation is true, then any situations that confuse the brain's ability to predict the sensory consequences of its own actions should scupper the sensory cancellation process, thereby making self-tickling a possibility. George Van Doorn and his colleagues have put this principle to the test in dramatic fashion. They measured the potential for self-tickling in 23 participants who underwent a body-swap illusion (open access article here).The experimental set-up involved each participant sitting opposite the experimenter. The participant wore a pair of goggles that displayed a video feed from a camera that was either placed forward-facing on the participant's own head (giving them a conventional first-person perspective), or was positioned forward-facing on the experimenter's head, thus giving the participant a view from the experimenter's perspective and provoking a ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs