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Phil Noble / Reuters
WARNING: Reading the following post will make you itchy.
There probably aren’t any tiny ants feeling their way over your limbs and across the back of your neck right now. But wouldn’t you feel better scratching anyway?
Why is it that seeing, discussing, or even just thinking about creepy crawlers makes us feel itchy all over? It turns out the experts aren’t sure.
University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Dr. Wenqin Luo places the blame for phantom itch on memories of an itchy past. Thinking about bugs, she explains, might prompt memories of previous experiences – “itchy associations.”
Why, then, doesn’t thinking about injuries prompt our bodies to feel phantom pains?
Dr. Luo offers the following theory: “Compared with itch, pain is a serious protective mechanism that triggers avoidance behavior. Thus, the threshold to trigger a pain sensation may be much higher than that of itch.”
Basically: If our brains registered pain (a danger) as easily as they do itch (an annoyance), our bodies would be sent into constant states of false alarm.
Dr. Glenn J. Giesler, Jr., a neuroscientist from the University of Minnesota offers a slightly different guess as to the phantom itch culprit: Maybe our skin always experiences the tiny sensations capable of causing light itch – but we only notice them when we’ve already got itch (or its creepy crawly causes) on the brain.
“It is amazing to me how easy it is to induce itch in others,” says Giesler. “Whenever I give a talk on the topic, I am amused at the percentage of people in the audience who start scratching.”
“Perhaps,” he guesses, “the threshold for sensation of itch is lowered by thinking about it.”
Dr. Gil Yosipovitch is a professor of dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. He’s also the founder of the International Forum for the Study of Itch.
He explains that a related phantom itching phenomenon, “contagious itch” (that is: itch felt not because of a physical stimulus, but because we see another person scratching), is a behavioral response similar to contagious yawning. Both are our bodies’ way of subconsciously expressing empathy and compassion for our fellow humans.
In fact, Yosipovitch says, sympathy scratching spans species – primates exhibit it too.
So, after all that, are we any closer to solving the mystery of the phantom itch?
Please. We’ve barely scratched the surface.
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Leave a Comment:
That photo is CREEPY! Made me jump and twitch! Spiders.... eek!
I thought that this was a well written and enjoyable, if not a bit itchy, story. Thanks Caity Weaver.
We had some bugs in our pantry once, and I could barely sleep that night because I was constantly itching. When I would fall asleep I would dream that the bugs were all over me or the bed, and I would even wake up and shake the covers off to be sure.
Interesting, the picture did nothing for me. Can't say the same about a picture with palmetto bugs or those huge Madagascar cockroaches, though, those are repulsive.
Me neither, but then again I used to breed and raise tarantulas...
I have never understood why so many people are so terrified of something that is 100 times smaller than they are... There are venomous spiders that should be respected, but not feared...
and as Calculus Entropy once put it: "Spiders is good... they eats the Cockroaches..."
I would sooner hold a six foot black snake, standing in a spider infested room, with a couple of mice in my underwear than have a cockroach crawl over me!
Bet that's not really your picture. What do the rest of you posters think?
I can handle an angle like that, but show me a head on shot of a jumping spider face with those big front eyes, and I freak like a girly man. I get willies just talking about it.
Great. Now I'm scratching and yawning. Why did I read this?
FAIL. It didn't make me feel itchy. What a dorky article.
"Why, then, doesn’t thinking about injuries prompt our bodies to feel phantom pains?"
Not true, I get that all the time, tell me of a horrific injury and I get creeped out because I can imagine the sensation. There are such things as phantom pains.