What Does A Kiss Do To The Brain?

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Now this is a subject that should hold everyone’s interest!  The touching interactions between men and women can raise the temperature of the face, according to studies….especially if you’re touching highly intimate areas like the chest and the face itself.  Hugging is always good.  Kissing passionately causes your adrenaline levels to rise, which boosts your heart rate and your face and body temperature.  But guess what?  Kissing also burns calories, too.  Now that makes it worth kissing, right?  Right!

Kissing Helps The Immune System

Now, open mouth kissing promotes salivary exchange in addition to generating heat.  Even though that sounds a little gross, the good news is that swapping spit exposes you to your partner’s germs, which actually boosts your immune system.  Bet you didn’t know that!  Of course, puckering up could be unsanitary at the start of cold and flu season.  We are actually more likely to get sick, though, by shaking hands throughout the day or touching things that have been exposed to others.

There’s a whole lot more going on down to the midsection, too.  As we see, these hot sessions give us some good insight into the physiological effect of hugging and kissing.  But, scientists in the Netherlands have reported we share about 80m bacteria during a passionate ten-second kiss. Our first experiences with love and security are usually lip pressure and stimulation through behaviors that mimic kissing.  Nursing a baby or bottle-feeding is an early event of neural pathways in a baby’s brain to associate kissing with positive emotions that are important throughout their life.  In fact, our lips are the body’s most exposed erogenous zone and packed with sensitive nerve endings.  Kissing activates a large part of the brain associated with sensory information.  Some kissing codes are setting off a cascade of neural impulses that bounce between the brain and the tongue, lips, facial muscles and skin, producing chemical signals that change the way we feel.

The neurotransmitter dopamine can be spiked with a passionate kiss, which is linked to feelings of craving and desire.  

Oxytocin, known as the “love hormone”, fosters a sense of closeness and attachment.  

Kissing fosters the sensations we describe when falling in love with that special person.  The act of kissing can also create a new romantic relationship as well as solidify the strong bonds we share with family members and friends.  There are many varieties of kissing that are tied to the most meaningful and significant moments of our lives by providing a means to communicate what our words cannot convey.  Kissing has barely begun to be studied, despite its obvious evolutionary and personal significant, but we already know it demonstrates there’s a lot more going on than what meets to eyes…..and those lips!  

So, pucker up and let it all go!  Take those kisses and give those kisses.  Throw in a few hugs and caresses while you’re at it!  After all, what can go wrong with that? (Just be sure it’s with the right partner, huh?)

img c/o pixabay