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Bodily Awareness

Lucy O'Brien

in Self-Knowing Agents

This chapter explores the claim that bodily awareness is a perceptual faculty or, more realistically, set of faculties. It shows that there are a number of ways to construe the widely accepted claim ... More

This chapter explores the claim that bodily awareness is a perceptual faculty or, more realistically, set of faculties. It shows that there are a number of ways to construe the widely accepted claim that bodily awareness is a perceptual faculty. Bodily awareness can be construed as a faculty which enables us to perceive properties of our bodies — its shape, location, movement, as well as phenomenal pain properties, tickle properties, and the like. Unless one is a sceptic about secondary properties, or has a specific reason for thinking that there could not be phenomenal perceptible properties of our bodies, there is no impediment to doing so.Less

“Handy Man”/“I Tickled ’Em”: New Arkansas Travelers Victor 21288

Tony Russell

in Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records

This chapter discusses New Arkansas Travelers, “Handy Man”, “I Tickled ’Em”, and music hall song

The Bolden Legend

Vic Hobson

in Creating Jazz Counterpoint: New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues

Jazzmen promoted Buddy Bolden as the legendary first man of jazz. Willy Cornish played with Bolden. Cornish was in a photograph of Bolden’s original band. Bunk Johnson too claimed to have played with ... More

Jazzmen promoted Buddy Bolden as the legendary first man of jazz. Willy Cornish played with Bolden. Cornish was in a photograph of Bolden’s original band. Bunk Johnson too claimed to have played with Bolden but was not in the photograph. Increasingly his claims did not seem credible. This chapter argues that the photograph was “tin type” photograph. That Bolden was not a barber; he did not write for the Cricket (although a friend Otis Watts did), that it was William Spillis who died on the Labor Day March in 1906, and that it is likely that Bolden made a cylinder recording because this information came from Willy Cornish. This chapter considers Bolden’s theme tune “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” and its relationship to ragtime tunes, “The Cake Walk in the Sky” (1899) and “The St. Louis Tickle” (1904).Less

Vocal expression of emotions in laughter

Diana P. Szameitat, Dirk Wildgruber, and Kai Alter

in Evolution of Emotional Communication: From Sounds in Nonhuman Mammals to Speech and Music in Man

Human laughter is a complex behavior expressed not only in the context of play as it is in animals, but also in various emotional states. This suggests that throughout evolution human laughter has ... More

Human laughter is a complex behavior expressed not only in the context of play as it is in animals, but also in various emotional states. This suggests that throughout evolution human laughter has adopted more complex communicative functions to reflect the increased complexity of human social interaction. This chapter outlines recent findings on perception, acoustic cues, and neural correlates of laughter sounds. Laughter sounds can be classified according to the emotional categories and according to different emotional dimensions, such as arousal, valence and dominance. Moreover, the acoustical correlates of laughter expressing different emotions can be discriminated on the basis of a small parameter set. Finally, the evolutionary diversification of ecological functions of laughter is associated with distinct cerebral responses underlying laughter perception. These findings indicate that human laughter is a multifaceted behavior serving distinct social functions.Less

Stein’s Tickle

Laura Frost

in The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

This chapter examines how and whether Gertrude Stein gives pleasure. Focusing on Stein's experimental writing from 1914 to her lectures of the mid-1930s, it suggests a new model for approaching her ... More

This chapter examines how and whether Gertrude Stein gives pleasure. Focusing on Stein's experimental writing from 1914 to her lectures of the mid-1930s, it suggests a new model for approaching her work: tickling. It considers tickling as an enduring social and scientific mystery and how its patterns illuminate Stein's methods and her reading effects. It also explores the ways that the gesture of tickling describes both the delights and difficulties of Stein's texts and also accounts for the wide discrepancies in readers' responses to her writing. Tickling, whose mysterious idiosyncrasies have intrigued theorists from Plato to Adam Phillips, characterizes Stein's infantile and erotic impulses, her abstraction and sensuality, and the sliding scale of pleasure to irritation that her work arouses. Stein's texts can be a pleasure machine or a torture machine or both, depending on the reader.Less

Cerebellar sense of self and sense of agency

John Montgomery and David Bodznick

in Evolution of the Cerebellar Sense of Self

The idea of the cerebellar self provides a framework from which to explore cerebellar function, starting with the insight this provides for human psychotic states that fail to distinguish ‘self’ from ... More

The idea of the cerebellar self provides a framework from which to explore cerebellar function, starting with the insight this provides for human psychotic states that fail to distinguish ‘self’ from ‘other’. One key task of cerebellar adaptive filters is to provide predictions of the consequences of our actions, called forward models, such as the sensory consequences of movements we make. For example, it is well known that an external tickle is more ticklish than self-tickle, an effect that can be attributed to the cerebellar attenuation of predictable input. Interestingly, people with some forms of psychoses do not experience the same difference, clearly implicating an underlying cerebellar dysfunction. A role for the cerebellar sense of self also extends to that compelling, but fragile, experience of controlling actions in the outside world. This is called our sense of agency, and it too depends on a match between expectations and eventualities.Less

‘A Sorrow, Soft and Agreeable’: Philosophies of Tickling

Joe Moshenska

in Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England

This chapter begins with the discussion of the problems presented by the experience of tickling in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, including the mysterious facts that one cannot tickle oneself, ... More

This chapter begins with the discussion of the problems presented by the experience of tickling in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, including the mysterious facts that one cannot tickle oneself, and that only certain parts of the body are ticklish. Later discussions of tickling in the Renaissance are considered, including the writings of Erasmus, Richard Mulcaster, and Francis Bacon. The chapter considers Galileo and Descartes, both of whom explored experiences of tickling as part of their attempts to produce a transformed understanding of the basis of sensation. Descartes explores a moment of tickling on the threshold of conscious experience in order to displace the traditional reliability of touch, while Galileo observes that a statue cannot be tickled in order to argue that ticklishness is not a real quality that inheres in certain objects, such as feathers, but rather in the ticklish parts of the body.Less

Perception for Action

Bruno and

in Perception: A multisensory perspective

Our bodies are not static, and multisensory signals are constantly being processed to produce motor behaviours. This chapter will discuss how multisensory interactions shape three kinds of such ... More

Our bodies are not static, and multisensory signals are constantly being processed to produce motor behaviours. This chapter will discuss how multisensory interactions shape three kinds of such behaviours: reaching and grasping objects with the hand, walking, and maintaining one’s posture. Motor control is inherently multisensory, as it involves combining anticipatory sensory signals from vision and proprioception, as well as, in some cases, other sensory channels, to prepare movements before they are actually initiated, and then combining online multisensory feedback to control movements while they are being executed. In addition, multisensory motor processes turn out to be important in understanding how we perceive agency, the awareness that our own minds are the agents that will allow our actions to take place, how we adapt to novel sensory environments, how we understand actions performed by others exploiting ‘mirror’ sensorimotor brain systems, and perhaps even why we can’t tickle ourselves.Less