Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:42:00
Are rats ticklish, and does it make them laugh?
Anyone who has ever owned a rat as a pet will not be surprised by this.
Aristotle declared that humans are the only animal to laugh, but then, he never saw this video of Jaak Panksepp tickling rats.
When you play it, you’ll hear the tickled rats chirping — an ultrasonic noise that’s audible thanks to the special equipment that enabled Dr. Panksepp and his colleagues to discover this phenomenon. Young rats make the same chirp when they chase and play with one another, and they like to hang out with other rats who chirp at this frequency (50 kHz). It seems to be a happy sound: rats will run mazes and press levers in order to be tickled, and they’ll emit the same chirp when the dopamine reward circuits in the brain are stimulated.
Some researchers still aren’t sure these sounds qualify as animal laughter, but Dr. Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, has been systematically gathering evidence of the parallels to human laughter. He hypothesizes that our most sophisticated forms of verbal humor tickle ancient brain circuits like the ones in the chirping rats.
So what's the point, other than to let us better personalize (and in doing so perhaps anthropomorphizing) the animals upon which we test our medical advances and keep as pets?
Although no one has investigated the possibility of rat humor, if it exists, it is likely to be heavily laced with slapstick. Even if adult rodents have no well-developed cognitive sense of humor, young rats have a marvelous sense of fun. We have already bred rats that exhibit playful chirping, and thereby hope to track down some of the genes for joy. Perhaps we will even stumble on new molecules to alleviate depression as well as some excessive-exuberance disorders.
Could tickling rats lead to a cure for depression? Sure, why not. I can tell you this: actually tickling some actual rats will alleviate depression in the tickeler, I know that for a fact. Best caged/pocket pet in the world. I miss my rats something awful.
The Mins in my pocket
Posted by JimK at 01:42 PM on March 21, 2007
Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email to a friend |
Categories: Personal, Things With Fur, Technobabble (Technology)
Tags:
Technorati: rats science animals laughter
Comments:
No comments yet.
RSS (Subscribe)
Tip jars (Donate today!)