14 May 2016

Scratching studies

From This Way Up, 12:50 pm on 14 May 2016

One of life's pleasures is scratching an itch!

That's because itching activates pleasure centres in the brain, and this can trigger further, purely gratuitous, hedonistic scratching too.

Diana Bautista of the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley studies itching, scratching and what they can tell us.

Scratching

Photo: (Flickr user Lee J Haywood) (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Gorilla Scratching Head

Gorilla Scratching Head Photo: (Flickr user Eric Kilby CC BY-SA 2.0)