Weird Tongue Sensations and an experiment you can try at home

[mikeyboy]

Dr. Steve -

I can kind of twist my tongue and hold it in my teeth so the tip of the tongue is upside down. When I do this, if I touch my tongue with my finger, the touch registers on my tongue on the opposite side of my tongue from where my finger is actually touching. It's kind of freaky. Does this happen to everyone? What causes this?

[Marc with a c]

marc -

What causes this?

boredom.

[Dr Steve]

Dr. Steve -

I can kind of twist my tongue and hold it in my teeth so the tip of the tongue is upside down. When I do this, if I touch my tongue with my finger, the touch registers on my tongue on the opposite side of my tongue from where my finger is actually touching. It's kind of freaky. Does this happen to everyone? What causes this?

Interesting. See, the brain is designed to recognize common input, and to make sense of uncommon input. Very few people can do the tongue twist thing that you describe. There's a whole myth that rolling the tongue into a "U" shape is determined by simple Mendelian genetics (Dominant/recessive genes, etc), but it's a learned behavior in a substantial fraction of cases. Tongue TWISTING, however, is a different thing altogether as far as I can figure. My kid can do it, and I can't no matter how hard I try to learn.

Anyway, the reason you feel the tactile illusion is because your tongue isn't designed to twist like that. The brain, knowing that the tongue doesn't move that way, tries to make sense of the input and assigns it to the wrong side of the tongue.

Normal people can feel this same kind of thing by doing this experiment:

1) stretch your arms out in front of you and turn the palms out, with the thumbs down.
2) without changing the orientation of your hands, move the right hand under the left and align the hands palm to palm.
3) interlock your fingers
4) rotate your locked-together hands backward toward you 270 degrees so that the interlocked hands are now pointing to the ceiling
5) without touching, have a friend point at a finger on either hand and try to wiggle just that finger. Most people will wiggle the finger of the opposite hand instead and the effect is quite jarring.

have fun!


your pal,


steve

[Chigworthy]

What causes this?

It's from all the seminogelin on your tongue.

[Dr Steve]

It's from all the seminogelin on your tongue.

see how smart you are? :smile:

best callback on the forum so far.

[topless_mike]

It's from all the seminogelin on your tongue.

im gelin... are you gelin ?

[Dr Steve]

im gelin... are you gelin ?

you mind if I use that line on the air?

:laugh: