The Trouble with Tickling…Yourself (6/23/25)

Grownups, Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Wow in the World early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or Wondery Kids Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hey, Wowzer fans! Mindy here. And before we start the show, did you know that you could receive pigeon mail? From Reggie? That's right. Reggie has been very hard at work in his new position as ambassador to the World Organization of Wowzers, the not-so-secret organization for wow seekers and super fans everywhere.

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The bubble corn abliction of magnificent proportion. My quarterly bean catalog. Ooh, an invitation to an elevator concert downtown. That looks interesting. Hmm, let's see. An advertisement for... Tickle yourself training? Hmm, tickle training. I'm gonna get you. What was that? What's happening? Who's there? It's gone. What was that? It just came out of nowhere and tickled me behind the knees and now it's gone. I need to tell Mindy about this.

I'm never going to believe this. Are you okay? Did the tiny mass tickling bandit get you? What? How did you know? Here, quick, get inside. It's on the news. I didn't know you watched the news. Of course I watched the news, Guy Raz. Gail Richard Simmons and I both wear the same shoe size. What? Anywho, the news is on a commercial break, but it'll be back in a sec. Have you or someone you love been the victim of a tickle attack? Yes! Tickle without...

Consent? Yes! Yes! Well, unwanted tickling is a violation of your personal rights. Call the law offices of Tammy Tickman today, because tickling should be fun, not forced. Wow, glad someone's out there fighting for our personal space and justice. I'll say. It's time to tickle. It's time to play. Tickle time, Teddy. Giggles all day. Wow, she really can't stop kicking. That's right. Tickle time Tammy is the doll that just won't stop giggling. And when she giggles, so do you. I'm giggling.

I'm giggling. Get your Tickle Time Tammy doll today. Giggles sold separately. Man, that doll's been around forever. Ooh, turn it up, Guy Raz. No, uh, sure. Welcome back to WOW News. I'm Gail Richard Simmons and tonight's top story, a tiny masked tickling bandit. wreaking havoc upon the town. I wonder who the tiny, masked, tickling bandit is. Well, I guess it's somebody tiny. We now go live to our reporter in the field, Bob Ralph Macchio. Bob?

What are you seeing out there? Thanks, Gail. I'm standing here with two of the latest victims of this tiny town tickler. Thomas Fingerling and Grandma G-Forces. Is that really your name? Yes, boy. Oh, no. Can you tell us what you think might be going up? Well, I'll take that microphone. Oh, boy. Listen up, everybody. There's a tricky-fingered little baby on the list.

and somebody better catch it before it tickles the whole town to death. Yeah, I was just minding my own business on account of I'm an entrepreneur with some weird little baby wearing a bra... Bang over its head pops up right up out of the nowhere. Yep, right out of the nowhere. And then it's all coochie coochie coo right here in the old armpit.

Hey, camera boy, get a close-up of the pet. Oh, good idea. You see my name? Wow. Fascinating. Let me just ask you... Listen here, you little baby. If you're out there, you better quit. Ticklin' everybody, or else Grandma G-Force, that's me, is gonna snatch you up by those little curled can shrimps you call Toes, and I'm gonna... Okay, I think that's all the time we have. Thanks, Bob. When we come back, hot tubs. Are they or aren't they just human soup? What in the...

Baby? On the loose? Launching tickle attacks on everybody in the town? Including me. I didn't even see it coming. Or going. That tiny tickler has really mastered the art of the sneak attack.

I think we need to call a neighborhood meeting, Mindy. The only way we're going to stop this town tickler is if we all work together to find this individual and get them to stop. Good idea, Guy Raz. I'll call the meeting. Opening the window. Man, it's jammed. That's because you installed it with jam. Okay, gonna have to punch it out. So much for my sugar glass window. Hey, excuse me, everyone! Emergency neighborhood meeting! Mindy's gingerbread mansion!

There we go, Guy Raz. All right. Upcoming! Walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. Welcome. Please, everyone, single file, one at a time. Hi, Dennis. Hi, Dennis. Baby Dennis? Hi, Big Mindy! Hi, Big Guy! No, no, it's just Guy. Reggie, how are you? Grandma G-Pors! What? Oh, we just saw you on the news! No autographs! Respect my privacy. I'm a public figure now. Yeah, stand back. We're famous. Okay, well, go ahead and sit down. Okay. Yeah, whatever.

All right, let's start this meeting. What's this meeting about, you two? Well, as some of you may have heard or experienced, there is a tiny, masked, tickling bandit on the loose, and it's wreaking havoc on the town. Havoc? Ricky! Yeah, it got me when I was out getting my mail. Something snuck up and tickled me right behind the knees. Yeah, that little stinker got me too.

Right here under my little chin muffin. And you didn't even see it coming, Reg? It got me twice. The first time I was attacked... I was just eating my soup in the pool at my water aerobics class. And then this nubby little hand came up through the water and booped me right in the belly button. I laughed so hard I peed right there in my swim trunks. It's true. He did. I saw it. It was right there in the pool. Oh.

What about you, Dennis? Did you get tickled? Yeah, Dennis, what about you? Well, I saw the tiny mass tickling bandit, and it tried to tickle me, but it didn't make me laugh. So technically, no, it didn't tickle me. Really? You didn't laugh? No, it was like I couldn't laugh, you know? Huh.

Interesting. This is starting to sound like a job for Detective Mindy and Inspector Guy Private Eye. Detective Mindy. I figured it out. What? I know who the tiny mass tickling bandit is. You do? Yep, it's Baby Dennis. No, that can't be true. Say it's not true. baby dennis it's true big dennis baby dennis is the titan tickler Did you know, Mindy? Yeah, Mindy. How'd you correct the case? What'd you use to uncover the truth, Mindy? Spill it. Well, science. Science? Yep. So hear me out.

Science says it's basically impossible to tickle yourself. Uh-huh. And since Dennis got tickled but couldn't laugh... Baby Dennis must be the culprit. That's right, because Baby Dennis is a dummy. A ventriloquist dummy. I think what Mindy is trying to say is that baby Dennis is just a... doll puppet and his voice and movements are all controlled by Big Dennis. So, if Baby Dennis tried to tickle Big Dennis, he'd basically just be trying to tickle himself. How about that?

Busted by scientific logic. Baby, Dennis is a little stinker. You certainly are. I mean, I've always known that you can't tickle yourself, but Mindy, you're saying science can explain why? Yeah, in fact... A group of scientists from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, they did a whole study on it. A study on why we can't tickle ourselves? Yep.

They wanted to find out once and for all why it doesn't work. So what did they find out? Well, first of all, they did what any good scientist would do, Guy Raz. They conducted an experiment. Yay! Experiments! Mother says I was an experiment. I do not think that was a compliment. So for this experiment, the first thing they did was gather a group of volunteers. People volunteering to be tickled?

And the researchers did two things. First, they had the volunteers be tickled by another person. Then they asked the volunteers to tickle themselves again. while being tickled by another person. And I'm guessing that afterward, they compared how ticklish people felt in both situations. You got it, Guy Raz. And then what happened next, I need to know. Well, it turns out they had...

had a rather surprising result. The researchers discovered that when people were trying to tickle themselves, even while being tickled by another person, they... didn't feel ticklish, or at least... Not as much. Amazing. This must have something to do with the signals that a tickling sensation or feeling sends to the brain. Yeah, exactly. So when we get tickled, millions of little...

teeny tiny sensors send messages to two main sections in our brains. First, there's the somatosensory cortex, and that's the part of the brain that helps us to feel touch. Like when someone tickles you. Exactly. And then there's another part of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex. That's really just a fancy name for the part of the brain that controls how we feel pleasure. Like when we laugh because it feels good.

Exactoritos, Guy Raz. And when someone else is tickling us, these two parts of the brain work together and our body begins to react. In the first 300 milliseconds, we might start to smile. or squirm, and after 500 milliseconds, We start giggling. But when we try to tickle ourselves... Well, when we try to tickle ourselves, we don't really laugh or squirm at all. It all comes down to something called prediction. Our brains...

can predict when we're going to tickle ourselves so it doesn't react the same way. Uh-huh. But when someone else tickles us, it's unpredictable. Our brain gets surprised, which...

causes our bodies to squirm and laugh and feel ticklish. You got it. Well, that's a very nice story, Mandy, but I don't want to know that. I want to know why that talking baby was running around tickling the whole town. That's a very good question, Grandma G-Force. Baby Dennis, why would you do something like this? For weeks, the whole town's been on high alert. Tell them, Baby Dennis. Tell them why you...

did this. Tell them why you decided to make yourself the town tickler. Well, Baby Dennis supposes... Baby Dennis was thinking... Yes? Baby Dennis thinks that... That shit, I'm taking the batteries out of you talking, baby. It's all Tickle Time Tammy's fault. Tickle Time Tammy? What? You mean that...

doll from the commercials? The one that giggles when you stab her with your finger? What? Yeah, that's the one! I mean, I guess that Tickle Time Tammy is a pretty famous figure in the world of tickling, but... How did this doll lead you to become the town tickler, Baby Dennis? Well, Baby Dennis wasn't always Baby Dennis. Tell the story, Big Dennis. Okay.

You see, before baby Dennis was the confident, sassy, handsome, yes, handsome baby ventriloquist dummy you know today, he was a simple but experimental doll known as Baby. I don't remember that toy. Of course you don't. Nobody does. Baby Poops' Pants sat on the toy shelf right next to... Tickle Time Tammy! People would come from far and wide to get their hands on the Tickle Time Tammy doll.

And poor little baby poops his pants just sat there on the shelf with his pants and his poop day after day, month after month. With no child wishing to call him their own. Oh, this is so sad. Call me choked up. And so that's why Baby Dennis tickled the town. Baby Dennis wanted to be like Tickle Time Tammy and make people laugh. Well, there are...

There are so many other ways you could make people laugh besides just tickling them. Yeah, Baby Dennis, you could tell jokes. But nobody laughs at Baby Dennis' jokes. That's true. Maybe you just need better jokes? No, Baby Dennis... The easiest way to get a laugh is to tickle. Well, I guess a laugh is a laugh.

Not exactly, Dennis. You see, a laugh from tickling is really just a reflex. It's something you can't control. Yeah, whereas a laugh caused by a reaction to a funny joke is more of a thinking laugh. In other words, your brain has... more time to process and respond to what you just experienced. You know, I actually just read a study about this in the science journal, Biology Letters. And according to a news...

Scientific study from researchers at the University of Amsterdam, the laughter we produce when we're being tickled is special and different from all of the other types of laughter. Whoa, so you're saying... that tickling has its own distinct or specific sound? How did they discover this, Guy Raz? Well, these researchers had a group of 200 people listen to recordings of around 900 real-life laughs. Laughs for science. Of course, anything for science.

Anyway, these 900 laughs were caused by all sorts of things, like people hearing funny jokes or watching funny things, and of course... Being tickled? You got it. And what they found was that 60% or more than half of the time, the group was able to correctly recognize the sounds of tickle laughter. Whoa, that's bonker. Right? And this evidence suggests that our brains recognize tickle laughter as something unique.

Wow, so laughter from being tickled and laughter from hearing a funny joke are two completely different types of laughter? That's what the researchers found. In studying the laughter, they noticed that laughter caused... by being tickled was faster, higher pitched, and generally just more chaotic than the laughter caused by anything else. Oh boy! Baby Dennis wants to recreate the experiment! Baby Dennis, no! Coochie, coochie, coo!

Daddy, stop tickling Reggie! Vincent, you're tickling me with your feathers! I can't believe that worked

Okay, well, now I think it's time that we put an end to unwanted tickle attacks once and for all. Yeah, because that baby's been sneaking up on everybody and coaching, coaching. cooing the daylights out of us, and I'm sick of it. So, from this moment on, these are the tickling ground rules. Number one. There will be no tickling of any sort without getting consent or permission from the other person. Number two, stop means stop. If the person being tickled yells stop,

Even if they gave permission to be tickled, the tickler must immediately stop. Yeah! Okay, baby Guinness will stop. And ground rule number three, keep it fun. If the... Tickling is terrorizing the person being tickled, and it's too much. Tickling should be happy laughs, not tears. That's what I'm saying. Keep your little curled canned shrimp fingers away from me, baby D. Well, now that we've laid down the rules of tickling...

Does anyone have any questions? Yeah, I got a question for Fingerling. Yeah? What is it, G-Force? Fingerling? May I have the honor of tickling your armpits? Why, yes, G-Force, you may. Coochie, coochie, coo! Question about the science of tickling? I have a question. Yes, Dennis? Reggie, I would like to make you laugh. May I please have your permission to... What? Reggie, what do you mean no?

Okay, fine. Um, grab a g-force. Don't even think about it, boy. Uh, Tommy? Not a chance, fella. Well, who am I supposed to tickle then? Tickle baby Dennis, big Dennis. Oh, okay. Coochie, coochie, coo! Tickle, tickle, tickle! It's time to tickle. It's time to play. Tickle time, baby Dennis. Tickles all day. Wow in the World will be right back. Grownups, this message is for you. to the show.

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