The Science Of Kissing

"Socializing is found across the animal kingdom, but osculation — or kissing — seems to a human behavior. How did it start and why? The Science of Kissing author Sheril Kirshenbaum discusses the history and biology behind kissing."

Excerpts from this podcast!:

"The earliest literary evidence we have for kissing dates back to India's Sanskrit texts, which are about 3,500 years old. But I would suspect, especially given all of these behaviors that I was talking about across the animal kingdom, humans have probably been connecting in some kind of similar way for as long as we've been here.

our lips are packed with sensitive nerve endings, so even the slightest brush sends a cascade of signals and information to our brains, and the amount of our brains associated with lip stimulation - sort of the brain's-eye view of the body in terms of touch - is enormous. It's very disproportionate to other organs. So in that way our lips are our almost exposed erogenous zones, and they're really our way of interpreting the world. And for all sort of reasons, we're drawn to another person's lips. It's a wonderful example of a behavior that's both nature and nurture. So humans seem to have this instinctive drive to connect with someone this way, but it's also very much influenced by our culture and personal experiences.

Scent plays a very big role in kissing. When we're kissing someone, we're engaging all of our senses. So rather than just getting visual information up until that point, all of a sudden our noses play a big role, our sense of taste, our touch.

And there's actually been research on - perhaps you've talked about this on the show, the major histocompatibility complex. So the set of genes, the MHC, which codes for immunity. And women seemed to be most attracted to men whose genetics for immunity are very distinct from their own. And so - I'm sorry - women seemed to be most attracted to the scents of men with an MHC distinct from their own. And so when we're kissing, we're in what we call our personal space. It's a perfect opportunity to get that sample and to sense whether this might be a good match for us. And the advantage of that would be, if two people with more genetic diversity in this region got together, their child might be stronger, healthier, have a better immune system, be more likely to pass on their genes.

So pheromones are a very controversial topic. Humans definitely secrete chemicals that we recognize as pheromones in other animals. But we're not quite sure whether humans have immunity to detect them."

Much more of this cute yet scientifically interesting interview at the link! Get ready for Valentine's Day and woo your sweetie with the science of kissing!


http://www.npr.org/2011/02/11/133686008/The-Science-Of-Kissing