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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.
@Sheril Hmm. There are at least two verbs for kiss in Sanskrit: √cumb and √niṃs. Moreover, there are several direct references to kissing in Ṛgveda, Book I Hymn 144, verse 1 pada d
yā́ asya dhā́ma prathamáṃ ha níṃsate
"they kiss [níṃsate] his first location"
So the statement about "the Vedas" is simply false.
@jayarava Interesting, I will have to explore that. The historian I interviewed as part of that chapter on the history of kissing passed away a few years ago. I’ll edit that toot.