Are you ticklish? My kids certainly are, and I only have to move my hands towards them in a threatening manner to have both of them giggling on the floor in laughter. My Japanese wife, however, isn't the slightest bit ticklish, and you could spend hours rubbing feathers over her body and not get the slightest response. I know nothing about the physiology of ticklishness or were it comes from, but my own pet theory is that stimulation of the the body during a young age causes the nerve endings to become more sensitive, which results in ticklish bodies when the kids get older. When my kids were babies, we did caress them and touch them a lot, something the Japanese wisely call skinship, yet my wife says that it's very un-Japanese to touch your children so much, and insists that she was never held or played with that closely when she was small. I've always believed that my wife's being raised in a traditional Japanese environment which had a lot less warm parent-to-child touching (imagine the planet Vulcan basically) led to her never becoming ticklish. Do you think people raised in happy, loving households are more ticklish as a result?
11 comments:
I can believe that to be true. My grandmother was an only child and I don't think that she was touched a lot by her parents when she was a baby and she was not ticklish at all.
Ah, I figured my theory wasn't going to hold up, but it was an interesting observation. My wife is definitely from the planet Vulcan ^_^
You can only be tickled by other people, never by yourself, because you only get ticklish because your body doesn't know what will come, I mean, it's a reaction of the body to the uncertain. I would think people who are seldom caressed are the most ticklish because they are not used to be touched and react most vigoursly to that type of stimulus... But then it must have something to do with the physiology as well, some people are just more tivcklish than others...
hi! i am claudia, and i like very much j-culture and j-language. in fact i will study japanese language at university. i'd like to help you spread your unique form of Japanese pop culture to the world. what i have to do? post the j-list link in my blog or myspace? i am glad to help us. please, answer me back ^^
claudia
Vy, yes, I've often wondered about that. I read that some of the greatest minds have puzzled over why there is such a thing as ticklishness, even Plato. One idea was that it was related to primate grooming.
Hi, Claudia, if you want feel free to join our Friends of J-List affiliate program, at http://www.jlist.com/PAGE/affiliates.html . Basically, you sign up and then we give you a commission for sales, either as cash or credit, your choice. Good luck with studying, you'll have fun although you'll be confused a lot of the time (that's normal, trust me). Where are you from?
I come from the north of Italy!
I've just create an account on J-List web site ; I am ready ^^
I think if you like a lot a thing , you will probably keep doing it, even if there will be troubles! I look forward to learning japanese. ;)
Wow, Italy, va bene. Grazzie mille for the reply. I tried studying Italian with my wife, but there seem to be 0 Italians in rural Japan where we are, so we switched to Spanish for a while. We've been to Rome twice and just love it. And I slept in a small Fiat outside of Florence (don't ask why).
heheheh italy is a nice place . you have to see also milan and go to sicily. when i'll go to japan, i will tell you !
O-tajnoubi omedetou, Peter-san. I know it's a bit early, but only by about an hour. ^_^
Anyway, I wanted to say that I read some anthropological paper once that said that some cultures, like the US, are very physically affectionate with babies, holding them & caressing them and so forth. Others, like Japan, are very verbally affectionate, with the parents talking to the babies much more. The benefit of the latter approach is, apparently, that the children learn to speak much earlier and in more sophisticated ways.
As for ticklishness... no idea.
wow, your theory on being ticklish seems so plausible! my brother and i are very ticklish. we are both half-korean but then again i've also been told that koreans are the most 'un-asian' of the asians.
That's funny, I never thought much about family history in relation to ticklishness, but when, prompted by your theory, I did, I see mostly contradicting examples ^^;
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