Captain Sole-O

There's a neuroscience lab where a robot named Hektor tickles people's bare feet. For science. 🧵 What I took away from the new Nature Human Behaviour paper on ticklishness 👇 1/ 448 people from Chinese, Dutch and Greek backgrounds mapped where they're ticklish. The maps came out nearly identical: neck, armpits, belly, soles. 2/ Tickling is its own sensation. A machine-learning model could tell the tickle map apart from maps of touch, pain and pleasure. 3/ Darwin guessed the least-touched spots are the most ticklish. His idea held up best, but no single theory explains it all. 4/ When a partner does the tickling, the map expands to the inner thighs and groin 👀 Paper: doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-0…