Science Proves You Can't Tickle Yourself, Even After Swapping Bodies With Someone Else!

You know how it’s not possible to tickle yourself?
Well, some freaky (or bored) scientists actually decided to do something about it!
They set up a test based on the theory that we can’t tickle ourselves because the brain negates any sensation caused by its own movements.
Dr. George Van Doorn and several colleagues created a body-swap illusion by setting up 23 test subjects and measured their potential for self-tickling.
According to the BPS Research Digest, the experiment was set up like so:

“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 body-swap illusion.
During both of these camera arrangements, the participant and experimenter each held one end of a wooden rod with foam at each end. The participant either moved the rod rhythmically with their right hand, causing the foam to rub against their own left palm (potentially causing self-tickling), and the experimenter’s left palm. Or, the experimenter was the one who moved the rod, causing the foam to rub against’s participant’s left palm (i.e. potential for tickling by another person) and his own left palm.”

The researchers basically made the person’s brain think their body was someone else’s.
Pretty cool.
But what actually happened when different participants tried the experiment??

“During the body-swap illusion, the participants said they felt the sensation of the foam, not where their real hand was located, but at the position of the experimenter’s hand. Given the illusion, they perceived this to be their own hand, even though it looked like someone else’s. Crucially, even in this strange situation, the participants were still unable to tickle themselves if they were the ones moving the rod (they felt the foam, but it didn’t tickle). They felt much more of tickling sensation when it was the experimenter who moved the rod.”

Oh… so, even though they had new bodies, they were still unable to tickle themselves.
Well that’s no fun. We guess our dreams of being able to do a solo tickle fight are still nothing but sad, lonely fantasies…