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The relationship between tickling, sensation, and laughter is complex. Tickling or its mere anticipation makes us laugh, but not when we self-tickle. We previously showed rat somatosensory cortex drives tickling-evoked vocalizations and now investigated self-tickle suppression and tickle anticipation. We recorded somatosensory cortex activity while tickling and touching rats and while rats touched themselves. Allo-touch and tickling evoked somatotopic cortical excitation and vocalizations. Self-touch induced wide-ranging inhibition and vocalization suppression. Self-touch also suppressed vocalizations and cortical responses evoked by allo-touch or cortical microstimulation. We suggest a global-inhibition model of self-tickle suppression, which operates without the classically assumed self versus other distinction. Consistent with this inhibition hypothesis, blocking cortical inhibition with gabazine abolished self-tickle suppression. We studied anticipation in a nose-poke-for-tickling paradigm. Although rats nose poked for tickling, they also showed escaping, freezing, and alarm calls. Such ambivalence ("Nervenkitzel") resembles tickle behaviors in children. We conclude that self-touch-induced GABAergic cortical inhibition prevents self-tickle, whereas anticipatory layer 5 activity drives anticipatory laughter. VIDEO ABSTRACT.
Pubmed ID: 31564493
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A multi-channel triggering hard-disk recording system designed specifically for bio-acoustics, although it can be used for other audio signals. This software uses real-time spectrographic and spectrum display and posesses a customizable metadata input tool for embedding user-defined data directly into the resulting .wav files. The maximum sampling rate for real-time display and streaming to disk depends on the type of acquisition board and computer performance. These embedded records can later be accessed from SASLab Pro and integrated into another metadata base.
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