TICKLE ME NO NO

On delight, diamonds, and why your cerebellum is ruining your life

I said the word tickled recently. It just snuck out. I thought I was going to use a totally different word, but tickle showed up instead. After a few people brought it up in later conversations, I got curious.

Tickled has been with us since around 1300. It started with Middle English tikelen which means to touch lightly. By the late 1300s it expanded to mean something else entirely. To excite agreeably or cause delight. The Latin version was titillare, which eventually became titillate, which went in a completely different direction and we’re not gonna go there.

Something neuroscientists know and we seem to have forgotten is you cannot tickle yourself. Literally, physiologically you just cannot. When you try, your brain generates what researchers call a predictive suppression which means the cerebellum part anticipates the touch and dampens the response before it arrives. Which translates into something is trying to gatekeep or manage your delight.

A real tickle requires another person to deliver the surprise or provide a light touch from a direction you weren’t expecting.

My parents would tell a story of when I was about two and I would run up to them and yell tickle me no no, tickle me no no. Which was, in the clearest possible terms, a request to be tickled. It was a game where I’d run away from the thing I most wanted. Saying no with my few little words and yes with every other part of me.

A few years later, my friend Crystal and I would play a strange game of hide-and-seek at Target where the whole point was to find each other in the towel aisle or toy section or under a rack of clothes and engage in a tickle (and maybe some scratching) fight. We would laugh while our parents tried to lose us. We’d leave the store bloody and happy.

As adults it seems we’ve developed very sophisticated versions of tickle me no no. We manage our expectations so delight can’t disappoint us. We stay cool so happiness doesn’t embarrass us. We get good at building systems of elegantly predictive suppression but use other more acceptable, adult words like being realistic, mature or not getting our hopes up. All basically code for becoming untickleable.

But life hasn’t given up on tickling us. It knows it’s worth it to keep trying and has a number of ways of sneaking itself into our existence- i.e the way that word came up in my conversation.

Take déjà vu as an example. That strange, disorienting flicker where your brain’s entire prediction system short-circuits and you’re right there in the middle of an ordinary moment going wait. What just happened? A weird little mystery feathering lightly on your ribs?

Or when you recognize yourself in someone else’s story. You’re reading or listening and something you thought you were in alone in someone else names it exactly. It’s like ohhh me too. It’s not that you learned something new as much as you got touched in a place you thought was unreachable. Someone found you in your towel aisle.

Yesterday, it happened at Lake Nokomis. Millie and I went for a walk which I think we can say was the real summer day in Minneapolis. The kind that arrives every May like it’s never happened before. The air showed up and every single person went outside. The lilacs were losing their minds. Lawn mowers hummed their first notes of the year. There were neighbors on sidewalks, alley garage sales. Little kids wobbling on bikes but already ready to ditch the training wheels.

As we got close to the lake, Millie pointed to the water and exalted its very royal shade of blue and then noticed how it looked covered by sparkling diamonds.

Something moved through before I could stop it. Something got past my brain’s prediction system and poked me directly. It was unexpected and involuntary as my daughter noticed the brilliant cut of shining waves on a lake and my heart did something my cerebellum never got the chance to approve.

It was a moment my brain failed me in the best way possible.

The question isn’t whether life is trying to tickle us. It is constantly, relentlessly, creatively doing everything it can. The actual question is whether we’ve built our defenses so high that nothing gets through anymore.

So here’s the weird thing I want for you this week. Lower your expectations. Take a moment and find a glitch in your suppression system. Let one thing get to you before you can stop it. Remember how good it feels.

photo is from yesterday’s walk. We stopped to see marlo but her husband Shawn was home instead. It’s the only documentation i have but will take it as he is incredibly cute.