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12 years ago, my 2nd book, The Science of Kissing (Hachette, 2011) came out. It’s about the neuroscience, biology, evolution, history, real chemistry & potential future of connection.
With #ValentinesDay around the corner, would fellow #science & #culture nerds on #Mastodon be interested in a few facts & stories from the book?
A Science of Kissing thread it is! I’ll add to this 
until Valentines Day:
1) Lips are the body’s most exposed erogenous zone. Unlike in other animals, human lips are uniquely everted, meaning they purse outwardly.
Kissing is about more than romance or bacterial exchange. Our 1st experiences with love, security & closeness often involve lip pressure & stimulation through nursing or bottle feeding. This lays down neural pathways in a baby’s brain that associate kissing with positive emotions.
2) The first literary evidence for kissing dates back thousands of years to India’s Vedic Sanskrit texts in moments such as lovers “setting mouth to mouth” & a man “drinking the moisture of the lips” of a woman.
Even Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology, was fascinated by kissing across cultures. He discussed what he observed in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man & Animals, concluding that the drive for humans to “kiss” in some form appears to be innate.
3) Meet the sensory homunculus. It's like a brain's-eye view of the body where each part is sized according to how much neural real estate goes toward processing sensory information related to touch there. As you can see, the lips & tongue are packed with sensitive nerve endings, helping us interpret our world.
4) Do other animals kiss?
We see many kissing-like behaviors in all sorts of species, but we don't call it “kissing” because scientists don't want to anthropomorphize & don’t know what motivates an animal. That said, these behaviors are always about a socially significant connection.
Dagnabbit, Pascaline! @pascaline@mastodon.nl@Sheril, I am often not happy when people say we should not anthropomorphise because it often boils down to 'animals are different and can' 't have the same emotions'. And I think 'why the heck not and what makes us so high and mighty to think that?'. So, go ahead and anthropomorphise if you like 