The Kiss Is So Telling
By Joel Garreau
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Only the hottest and highest species do it....
"A kiss is a blast of information that you are sending out and information that you are receiving," says Helen Fisher, the Rutgers anthropologist who is the author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love."
"Basically it's a mate assessment tool. Much of the cortex is devoted to picking up sensations from around the lips, cheeks, tongue and nose. Out of 12 cranial nerves, five of them are picking up the data from around the mouth.
"It is built to pick up the most sensitive feelings -- the most intricate tastes and smells and touch and temperature. And when you're kissing somebody, you can really hear them and see them and feel them. So kissing is not just kissing. It is a profound advertisement of who you are, what you want and what you can give."
"At the moment of the kiss, there are hard-wired mechanisms that assess health, reproductive status and genetic compatibility," says Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a professor of evolutionary psychology at the State University of New York at Albany who studies reproductive competition and the biology of interpersonal attraction.
"Therefore, what happens during that first kiss can be a make-or-break proposition."
For example, a woman can sense whether the man's immune system proteins are different from hers, thus increasing the odds of healthy offspring. "Women apparently are quite drawn to men who have differences rather than similarities in their histocompatibility system. They pick it up by smell, and they can pick it up from kissing," says Fisher, who is also science adviser to Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com.
Kissing thus not only conveys serious evolutionary advantage. It can dramatically alter the outcome of Saturday night.
Sweet, sinful, saucy or sublime, a smack on the lips is always something to remember.
A survey of 1,041 college students led by SUNY Albany's Gallup found that 59 percent of men and 66 percent of women reported at least once finding someone attractive only to discover after the first kiss that they were no longer interested.
"I think we have evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction," Fisher says. "One is the sex drive. The second one is romantic love -- that elation, the craving, the obsessive thinking -- and the third is attachment, the sense of calm and security you can feel with a long-term partner.
"So what does kissing do? You're exchanging testosterone -- that can help to trigger the sex drive. If it's exciting and novel, it's likely to drive up dopamine -- that's associated with romantic love. And if it drives up oxytocin in long-term partners, it's triggering the attachment system. So any one of the three profoundly basic mating systems in the brain could be triggered by kissing."
Okay, but if kissing is all that important, why has kissing lost its iconic status? Why, according to the giant Gallup survey, do 52.9 percent of men and 14.6 percent of women (that high!) feel that they can readily skip the snog and dive right into the sack?
Why, today, can you no longer imagine a movie being made like "Casablanca," which pivots on the question of whether "a kiss is just a kiss"?
Compare that with today. In some quarters, you can't pay to get kissed. By all accounts, hookers avoid it specifically because it connotes attachment and intimacy....
www.washingtonpost.com.kissing libby
Linkback: http://4seasonschat.com/index.php/topic,13102.msg145002.html#msg145002
Topic: Kissing (Read 283 times)
