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Rats Are Ticklish Too
The belly is the rat's most ticklish body part.
You may not think of rats as warm and cuddly, but it turns out they have at least one cute trait: They’re ticklish, just like us. In a recent experiment in Berlin, Germany, rats sought out researchers’ hands to get tickled and even emitted ultrasonic squeals of laughter while being tickled. Attaching electrodes to rats’ brains, scientists precisely pinpointed a tickle center in a mammal brain for the first time. Why does that matter? Though tickling is a basic behavior in humans and some other mammals, its mechanisms are little understood. The researchers at the Bernstein Center Berlin say rats could help shed light on how tickling works and why it’s been around so long. “Rats and humans [diverged] maybe 100 million years ago,” one researcher told Scientific American. “But the phenomenon of ticklishness is remarkably similar.”