Incredible: Rats Laugh When You Tickle Them!

It sounds like a joke, but it may be very true!


Scientists listened to animals playing and they noticed something that appeared to them to be laughter. They studied this behavior for couple of years before acturally realizing that it is laughter.


Soon they got a device which transformed higher frequency sounds to frequencies our auditory system can hear.


So they developed a way to ask these rats if they liked being tickled and the answer was definite yes!



* Jaak Panksepp According to wikipedia:


Jaak Panksepp (born June 5, 1943) is an Estonian-born American psychologist, a psychobiologist, a neuroscientist, the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University.


Panksepp coined the term 'affective neuroscience', the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He is known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals, such as rats.