Weird question, but what does tickling actually feel like?

[hopefulscrambl]

So, I'm not ticklish, and I haven't been since I was a child, so I don't have any clear memories of being tickled. And while I have tickled people, and seen people being tickled, there's always this epistemological leap there. I can see limbs move and mouths make noise, but what's happening in their mind? I don't know, I can't know because of my biology, and it weirds me out there's a whole sensation I know nothing about.

So, what does tickling feel like? Compared to other sensations? Itching, pain, pins and needles, what? I know it's hard to relay sensations in words but even just a basic idea would be nice.

Anyone up to trying their best to explain an abstract sensation to sooth my weird abstract worry?

 

[Comfort Eagle]

Electricity except it feels good.

 

[footplaything]

It’s like when every nerve is heightened. Sensitivity is at its maximum. Your body is overtaken with chills that run up your spine that never stop. Similar to that euphoria when your enjoying something/someone but you want more. You want to be taken over the edge. The feeling of some one taunting and playing. Brushing your skin gently is similar to the heightened feeling of anticipation you get on a roller coaster climbing slowly up the hill. As you go down the hill you lose yourself and you get this extreme feeling of excitement deep inside. Its the best, especially with the right person.

 

[SadCuzNotTcklsh]

So, I'm not ticklish, and I haven't been since I was a child, so I don't have any clear memories of being tickled. And while I have tickled people, and seen people being tickled, there's always this epistemological leap there. I can see limbs move and mouths make noise, but what's happening in their mind? I don't know, I can't know because of my biology, and it weirds me out there's a whole sensation I know nothing about.

So, what does tickling feel like? Compared to other sensations? Itching, pain, pins and needles, what? I know it's hard to relay sensations in words but even just a basic idea would be nice.

Anyone up to trying their best to explain an abstract sensation to sooth my weird abstract worry?

Yup. Not being ticklish certainly sucks...

 

[EmbraceSerenity]

It just gives me chills. Even before you're tickled, its that whole anticipation and when you start to feel your ler's fingers, its incredible, its lightning quick, but as soon as they stop, its like that thrill, that joy is gone. Its not painful in any way, its just ever so light, fingers dancing on your bare areas, but with the tongue its like nothing else. It just feels so good, as well as making you writhe and laugh.

 

[ILoveLadyFeet1]

It's like the panic of drowning, except you're drowning in laughter and twitching.

 

[hopefulscrambl]

This is all useful, thanks! I am sorry for sounding like some weird alien studying humans!

 

[AlexaBlissFan_m]

This is all useful, thanks! I am sorry for sounding like some weird alien studying humans!

DO NOT WORRY ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH, FOR I TOO AM A FELLOW ZOGNOID -i mean - FELLOW HUMAN FROM CHAPTER 38 OF GALAXY SECTOR ZZ. I UNDERSTAND YOUR PLIGHT FELLOW HOOOOMAN!!

 

[Yote]

You feel chills when you're lightly touched. It's a sensation that's kind of like when you strongly anticipate something, except physical.
Lol, describing how tickling feels is harder than I thought now that I'm trying to do it.

This is all useful, thanks! I am sorry for sounding like some weird alien studying humans!

Hey, if you're really an alien, I'm fine with you doing this kind of research on us.

 

[Wade]

It's kind of like having control of your body seized by someone else. You're squirming and twitching before you even realize you're under attack. Your hands are flying to defend spots without your telling them to. You're laughing -- with wild abandon, full-on uncontrolled belly-laughing -- without even knowing why. That's always my initial experience of a tickle-assault: I'm aware of the all-consuming involuntary effects it's having on my body before I'm even aware of the sensation.

The quality of the sensation itself is elusive. At the hands of some wickedly effective ticklers it's like there's this alchemy: the meeting of their fingertips and your body creates a third thing seemingly out of nowhere -- a quivery, squiggly, nearly electric phenomenon at the point of contact that causes your muscles at that spot to spasm and contract as these just audaciously relentless sensations barrel from that tickle spot through the rest of your body like a bullet train, shoving everything else out of your mind, narrowing your entire world to this flood of paradoxically localized stimuli.

In a sense, the sensation itself -- the giddily intolerable convulsive paroxysms of feeling inflicted at the point of ticklishness, so like pain in their expression and functioning but so completely unlike pain in every other aspect -- is for me inseparable from the effects of the sensation (the writhing, the flailing, the helpless cascades of laughter). The cause and the effect are so tightly twined in my experience as to be not just simultaneous but the exact same thing.

In my experience, if you can -- in the midst of the upheaval of being overwhelmed by your own ticklishness -- focus on the actual phenomenon of fingers-against-skin, the motion and the friction and the simple unremarkable physicality of it, you can almost start to dull or mitigate the giddy helplessness of the tickling. If you can get past that separate, incongruous, extra sensation that's being created in collaboration between her fingers and your nebulous ticklishness, it almost seems as though the mere experience of being touched shouldn't have to incapacitate you at all. I've never quite gotten there -- that third creation, the tickle-response, always reasserts its dominance over my system -- but it feels like an almost mystical element that's being created there where the tickler meets the ticklish.

Some ticklers -- my sister-in-law's like this -- seem almost to have the ability to conjure the palpably twitchy and irresistible sensation of being tickled before her fluttering fingertips even reach my body. It's not just the cringing surrender of anticipation (though I've experienced that too) but an almost telekinetic effect -- like she's creating that extra element of the tickling sensation just a few seconds before making actual physical contact. But it literally feels like her fingers are already upon me. So is that extra element psychological? Is the phenomenon linked to physical contact but not limited to it?

Anyway. I think I'm offroading at this point...

 

[SillyTheKidd]

It’s a quantum state : in the space of the same moment in time you feel panicked, shocked, and at the same time you’re laughing and within the spaces of those seconds that laughter feels like relief or joy.

Your higher mental processes are numbed - you can make out the sound of your laughter but it doesn’t feel familiar.

You hear the voice of the tickler or see their face but that is fleeting. But something in their face has changed. You see the look of their awareness of their power over you.

You really communicate except on the most base level. The laugh over powers your communication centers in your brain. I remember sometimes laughing so hard that I couldn’t remember the words “stop” or “please” or whatever the safeword was.

When it’s done it lingers for minutes - you can access that feeling in your tickle spot as a synaptic memory and then you can flash back on it sometimes for years .

That being said I’d be willing to pay 1000 bucks for a great tickle tomorrow

And having said all that I’d

 

[emmahdez1987]

I think tickling is a really fun game. I'm an extremely ticklish woman. I love to laugh and be tickled. My most ticklish spot is definitely my soles. When I get tickled on that part of my body, I lose control, however, I like to feel the movement of my toes on the soles of my feet or the passage of a hairbrush or toothbrush. The feeling is too exasperating and fun.