Philematology (KISSING) with Robin Dunbar

Oh hey, it's yesterday's coffee, that's now today's iced coffee. Ali warred back with a tender, sloppy, heartfelt episode of Ologies. Oh kissing, oh smoochin, suck and face?

Who?

Why? For how long?

How? That's right? This week we're gonna go all the way to first base. But before we toss me boss, let's say some thank you to all the folks at patreon dot com slash Ologies for supporting the show since literally day one, for being our backbone. And also for all the folks wearing your Ologies hats and backpacks and

To probe the topic.

So I searched scientific journals just for the word kissing, and then I found several studies done by a professor and an anthropologist at Oxford in the UK. Hot diggity boy, howdy, this dude was legit. He got a bachelor's and a master's in psychology and philosophy from Oxford University, a PhD in psychology on the social dynamics of Salata baboons. He's a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford.

Oh.

I wanted to be one of his one fifty and interview him so much, so I emailed him and he wrote back saying no, but more politely, a quick two sentence rejection. I'm afraid I'm just too tied up with other commitments of the moment. My apologies. So I wrote back with literally a pretty please in the subject line. He wrote back, a shimmering letter just said yes, fine by me. I literally gasped. I screamed when I got it.

We'll fix it in post. But we gave it a good try.

I was terrified already of this interview. So much at stake, such a well regarded dude. Will I botch it? How does the rest of it go? Or do we bond immediately and have a jolly time talking about smooches and first kisses, and why people kiss, and the microbiome and social relationships, kissing in other animals, why we fall in love with some people and not others, the notion of soulmates,

Let's do it.

Okay, good, okay, First off, Hi, thanks for.

Being here, and this is all edited, so don't worry.

We'll cut out anything anything textical.

That's anything sensible and leave the rubbish.

Yeah, yes, exactly, only the rubbish. That's what we're going for. And so now I'm not sure if this is a word that gets used often, but you aren't a filmatologist, would that be correct a person who studies kissing.

Well, I wouldn't have said that quice. But I've never heard the word before.

It's a real word. It's an actual word. A filmatologist. Yeah, filmatology is the study of kissing. And I don't know if you know, but you are one of the world experts in it. Literally, I've been looking for an expert in this to do this ology for like years and you're you're the dude.

We have done a little bit, but it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what we spend.

Our lives really doing. Honest, go well, milood.

As they say in criminal courts to the judge, it wasn't me, midlud.

I didn't do it again. Over four hundred papers authored, written or edited more than twenty books, including Thinking Big, How the Evolution of Social Life Changed the Human Mind, The Science of Love, and the Science of Love and Betrayal. Oh the British. They all have honorary doctorates in self deprecation. Well, you've done it more than anyone else, so I'm going to ask you what you know about it. So, and you're an author, you're an evolutionary biologist, you're an anthropologist,

I guess in a way, this sort of, as much as anything, goes back to the fact that I grew up in East Africa, and so you're kind of immersed in many different cultures there, and in the end it kind of drew me off into initially psychology, and then I ended up studying primates in Africa again, but monkeys mainly, and spending an awful lot of time studying them before I, twenty years or so later, ended up back again studying humans properly for the first time.

Was it at all a relief to start studying the behavior of humans because you could ask them questions?

Or was it just more complicated?

It was complete desperation.

Because I would have carried on studying monkeys and antelope, which we've been studying as well, but there was no funding available for anything like that in Britain during the nineteen eighties, and I ended up studying humans because they were there on the street and you could do.

A lot, a lot of the kind things.

You could ask the same kinds of questions we'd been asking about primate behavior, you could ask of humans too. You know, why do they choose this person to make live? Why do they you know, why do they invest in their children? And the way they do? All these kind of questions we ask of monkeys and apes when we study them.

You can kind of do on the street and it was free. You didn't need a big grant to do it.

And people, you know, you could ask them questions because you know they obviously were people. You could give them surveys to fill in as well as well as observe them.

And what led you to want to study social relationships? Because you're known for the Dunbar number, You're known for a book The Science of Love?

Like, what is it about social relationships?

You know nothing about love?

You got to know something if you're a scientist about it.

My boy or not, you were a world expert in this. I mean I guess that that must put a lot of pressure on you in relationships. If you are an expert in them.

Tell me about it, all right?

His Wikipedia page notes that he's been married at least once, but we were only a few minutes in. It was too early to pry. But he's charming and affable. I imagine that, plus his research history, I bet that's a hit in social situations.

Okay, So yes, I suppose all the way through. Ever since I first studied anything in the world, even before I started by Pah, what I was interested in was social evolution. How do different society, different animal societies, you.

Know, come to be?

And why did one species have one kind of society and other species have another kind of society. So that's a kind of rather a big question because you have to study practically everything about them, their ecology, their genetics, their evolutionary hastens on. And then that transfers very easily across to humans because obviously different cultures have different societies.

You know, their culture is their society if you.

Like, and you know you can ask meaningful questions about why one group living in one area has gone down one particular road, has the kind of you know, perhaps their polygamists, and another group living somewhere else and monogamists, or those kinds of questions.

Now you've studied monkeys, and you've studied apes including humans.

Do other animals kiss on the mouth?

Yeah, actually some of the other mammals in fact do.

I mean, it's not really common in the way it is in humans, or even to some extent the way it happens in some of the monkeys snapes where they kind of do a kind of lip to lip.

Kissing, and particularly with babies.

I think you know, mother monkeys mouths their babies often and frequently, and then you know in some species they will feed them titbits that they've been eating, you know, mouth to mouth, So you can kind of see where kissing came from if you like.

It's easy to see. But I mean, nobody.

Does this stuff to the quantity and quality of humans. I want to kiss you.

Why do you think humans have a slobber on each other?

This is almost the big evolutionary question that remains unanswered.

Is all clear? There are various suggestions one can make.

One is it's clearly very kind of erotic if you like, it's very arousing, and the lips have a lot of brain tissue devoted to them, sensory brain tissues devoted to the lips, you know, disproportionately so put it this way,

Endless sun, chill vibes, hot bodies.

The world is a beautiful place and very trusting as a person you're doing.

This with or who's doing it too.

And these involve a very special set of neurons which only respond to light, slow stroking of the skin. And we have those neurons too. They're known as the sea tactile neurons. They don't do anything else. They're not involved in pain or anything, you know, sensing pain or anything like that. We respond exactly the same way. So that's why in our closer relationships we're very tactile. You know, it's an awful lot of cuddling and petting. And I

Tap on the shoulder and the arm around the shoulder and all this kind of thing that goes on.

You know, we're very tactile in that sense, even though we don't really think about it. But on the other hand, is the because it's a very intimate thing, as it is in monkeys' names, you don't do it with everybody.

Bacteria.

Right now, a ten minute kiss, I forget the exact amount, but it results in the exchange is something like ten million bacteria from one body.

To the next.

So a twenty fourteen study out of Amsterdam revealed that one ten second French kiss can transfer eighty million microbes into your partner's mouth. That is, the entire population of New York City cramming into your mouth every second of a kiss.

That's love, baby. If he was interested in me, what my germs? He just craved my germ.

Now this is quite useful because actually it tells an awful lot about the other person. So we've both got bacteria, the microbiotic sort of elements from the other person being exchanged.

But also you're getting a.

Lot of their the saliva and stuff, a lot of the enzymes and other bits and pieces that the body produced them, particularly immune systems. So your personal smell, I hate to raise this tricky issue at this junker, but your personal smell and taste are directly determined by the same genes, same set of genes that determine your immune system.

Really, so we're using our tongues and our snoops to gather intimate intel about a person's immune system. You thought Google was sneaky? Who the nose is sneakier, so's the tongue. And now doctor Dunbar addresses some Western flimflam about different greetings such as the kunic greeting of Inuit folks and the malory greeting the Hongi, among others.

It's a complete myth that they're rubbing noses.

What you do is you put your nose side by side or just in front of somebody else's and you breathe in slowly and deeply, And as the Maori is put it, this is you're breathing in their spirit, right, so you're actually breathing.

In their smell.

And by the same extension, when you kiss folk, you're you're tasting their same immune sysm. You're actually checking out who they are and whether you like them or not. And the people you like tend to be people who have a different set of immune genes to the ones

Can you've been handed on by your parent.

What a lot of species do is spend a lot of effort and time looking for people who have similar, not identify, but very similar genes to them. So that means they're kind of bringing that same family set back together again, except for immune system genes, because what ideally you want in your beautiful bouncing babies is as broad a set of immunities as possible.

So if you pick the same ones, you know, they're only.

Acquiring immunities to half the number of diseases and bacteria stuff.

It's possible.

Whereas if you pick sort of somebody who's really quite different, you're giving them a much better chance in life.

So if someone rejects you, not necessarily, but just if someone rejects a person, it might just be that your immune systems are too similar.

Can you take that? Is that like a way to take heartbreak? Construct?

Yes? Yes, they're family, they're family.

Has any of this research that you've done, I know, is it difficult not to apply it to your own life the lives of people that you know?

Oh?

I think if you work on human behavior.

You just inevitably spend most of your time sitting at the back of the pub watching people.

It's really difficult not to do that.

And it's such fun, you know, just see and even you know, I mean, it's amazing if you read something like Jane Austen's book, she is such an acute observer of human behavior, it is unbelievable, you know, considering she was writing.

A very narrow.

Social background, you know whatever, it was nearly three hundred years ago, you know, I mean, her observations of the foibles of human behavior, particularly in the mating arena, like just electric. And this is what makes the films that, you know, the kind of costumed dramas that they do of her novels so successful. You know, they're just such acute observations on you know, the little things that bother people about relationships.

She was an anthropologist.

I guess she has to rank as before anybody even thought of the name anthropology.

She has to rank as the founding mother.

I may have lost my heart, but not my self control.

And now, if you're in the pub and you see people on a date, can you tell by the way they kiss whether or not they've got fireworks or if you're watching like Love Island or something, I would.

Give it an eight strong kiss. It's very wet and volumptuous. Oh god, not that.

The bachelor.

Yes and no, it's it's it's I think it's probably hard to tell. I mean, there are I mean this, I mean it actually is really very hard to tell because in many ways the two sexes behave quite differently.

In those sort of contexts.

So women are much more attentive when they're meeting even just meeting a boy for the first time, and this caused a lot of problems I think for boys, because boys are not that great in terms of social skills really.

Signals the girls. Girls kind of have this way.

Of being very attentive to you, and you know, sort of paying close attention when they're not really interested.

Straight sis, non binary, LGBTQ. If you have ever been on a date and thought, wow, that one amazing and then it goes through, well this might be because one never knows how an ego is going to take rejection in real time, so to play it safe, you might just pretend to be interested and also more romantically and optimistically, doctor Dunbar explains, you.

Know when you first meet somebody, you kind of don't know really whether they're the right person or not. So the last thing you want to do is kind of put them off. You want to kind of keep them interested a bit, or keep them interested long enough that you can assess their inner self, as.

It were, and figure out whether.

They're the right person for you or not. Do they see the world the way you do? Do they have the same kind of more on political views as you, They have the same interest Do they like the same music, they have the same sense of humor?

All these kind of.

Boxes that you would like to have ticked, And it takes a long time to find out all these details, so you need to invest that a lot of time. It turns out that the more boxes you have ticked of that kind, the longer the relationship will last. Really you want to yeah, you do want to make sure you know you don't you don't want to take a complete Duffers.

Yeah. I looked it up and Duffer is an incompetent or stupid person. And I'm not British, but I don't think that's a compliment or a box you want to check in your dream date.

So you need to check check out this person and make sure that that they do check tick your boxes with or at least as much as possible, because there's no mister right or misright.

You know, there's no no such thing as perfection.

Well no, okay, maybe there is somewhere, but they're sort of somewhere in the know. How many of us are other on the planet now seven billion or something, so that makes three and a half billion of each sex. So somewhere in that three and a half billion there is mister or miss right.

You know you're never going to find them. You know, there's many lifetimes of search.

Oh god, this is like a Morrissey song. It's romantic but incredibly depressing.

So what you do is you do exactly as Jane Norsten says. Right, we're all there looking for mister Darcy because you know he has the chisel features and you know, the cultured family background and the biggest state.

And all that kind of thing. But only one.

Person's going to get mister Darcy, right, So what are the rest of you do? The rest of the rest of us have to settle for the curate. The great problem is, you know, all of us in the end settle for a compromise, because otherwise.

You will never find anybody you know.

You will always be rejecting them is not quite mashing up to your levels of perfection. And if you accept a kind of compromise, there's always a risk that.

It's kind of not going to work as well as you'd hope. That's life.

But what about our early evaluations can help lead us toward a partner who's right for us? Can we tell from making out with someone whether or not like this could be long term?

I think so.

But this is the end product of a long process of courtship in effect.

In other words, if you look at what happens.

During courtship, normally it sort of breaks down into a series of stages, and at each stage you kind of explore the qualities of the person before you, and then you just hold off a moment and go should I pull.

Out here or should I go to the next level right right now?

Those levels tend to start with distance cures so vision, so do they do they look pretty or do they look canceled? According to the respective sexes they you know, are they attractive? And then it moves into a sort of kind of conversational mode. I think where you're now close enough to talk to them, so you now picking up on all the cultural boxes what I call the.

Seven pillars of friendship.

There's seven dimensions which are a bit like a supermarket barcode on your forehead, verbal supermarket barcode. They are also the things you like and dislike, and.

You know, the the languages you speaking, all these kinds of things that make up this complex of cultural elements that you know tick your boxes or don't ture boxes according to your personal interests.

Okay, quick aside. I looked up doctor Dunbar seven pillars of friendship, and essentially things that make us bond with are one growing up in the same place, especially during the core teenage years. Two speaking the same language, three having the same education for enjoying the same type of hobbies, five sharing the same moral or political point of view, six having a similar sense of humor, and seven sharing

But having decided that you know they meet most of your requirements, at that point you kind of move into a bit closer which is why kind of old fashioned dancing was very suitable because, you know, in sort of couple dancing, waltzing and all this kind of thing, you're now into breathing territory and you can have a good sniff and check the immune system from a little distance, you know.

And here's the interesting thing. I mean, you know, we often think.

Of perfumes as sort of designed to obscure all the horrible bodily smells that you have, and in fact it's actually quite the reverse. Really, Yeah, the perfumes you like, they're very, very very personal to you. They actually are the ones closest matched to your own person natural bodily smell. So what you're doing is enhancing your natural bodily.

So if you tend to gravitate toward fruity ones or musky ones, that's more an amplification of your own sense.

Yes, yes, so that's that's that's your own natural body odor, not the kind of sweaty, sweaty armpits you probably do want to cover up. Natural And that's why there are so many different scents. And this is why I try and tell guys you should never buy a girl perfume. You know, you'll get it wrong because you'll buy the one you like, and it may not be the one that she likes because it doesn't match her natural.

A natural body sense.

So then and then you know, once you've kind of gone to that point, you.

Know, at the next point your your.

Can try a little kissing, I think is the answer, because that gives you another sort of look into peer into their soul in a sort of taste sort of way, or taste and smell are kind of really want and the same thing in the end, you know, And if you're happy with that, then you know, take the breaks off.

Take the breaks off.

It's like that should be someone's tender bio. Now, how are you studying this? Are you behind one way glass with a clipboard and getting people drunk? Are you having people fill out surveys? Like?

How do you study this?

Everything we've done by lad.

On kissing anyway has been by surveys or offering people vignettes, a little vignettes. You know, here's I don't know, here's Jim and a little bit about Jim and how good.

A kisser he is. And here's Fred, a little bit about Fred? Which do you prefer? That kind of thing?

But this is sort of back to off a lot of work we did on make choice strategies, which are done by looking at lonely hearts ads in the days before Tinder arrived, where people kind of you know those old newspaper ads where you would say, you know a little bit about yourself and a little bit about who you were looking for. They were very very nice little summary is of what people actually had in mind, and sometimes also how they carefully didn't say things which they thought might.

Be unhelpful, such as.

Where they lived if it was kind of downmarket.

So if you looked at London ads, because the London postcodes, the zip codes, you know, if I suppose to true any big city, really there are kind of upmarket zip codes and downmarket zip codes, and you never ever saw downmarket ones, but you often saw upmarket one. Really things like that, and most of the time you wouldn't even notice. It took us a long time to realize that that was what was happening up down Debby.

When you're showing people vignettes and you're like, here's gym herespread, this is what kind of kiss they are?

How do you determine what a good kisser is?

Because I think anyone who's dated more than one person has kissed a good kisser and has been subjected to a bad one.

Like, how do you determine that?

We carefully try to avoid it. We just left it up to the imagination of the subjects, right, I guess in these kind of things you are trying to elicit people's natural responses. So if you're too specific, often that just doesn't give them the freedom of imagination for themselves.

So you have to leave it up to them to write their own romance novel. So doctor Dunbar mentioned a wonderful Austrian anthropologist, Carl Grammer, whose career has been spent doing observational studies of courtship behavior of humans by gathering data going to a disco, if you will, and watching and taking note of how people are interacting. And I was like, no, people don't do this, and doctor Dunbar was like, yes they do. He's he's done science in.

The club and we've done stuff in nightclubs on dancing and on conversations, and those have all been done on smartphones. Smartphone is just a computer basically, isn't it. So you can load upload software that you would normally have on a iPad or something like that. And you know, you can just press buttons and everything gets.

Recorded, so you're coding data sets. But it looks like you're just like, yeah, text.

Sedding texts, and you're really boring because he's just sitting in the corner sending texts.

So why would you want to go and ask them.

For a gat?

Oh my god? Now what about long term partners? Do people kind of stop kissing after a while? Should they continue kissing? Or once they've sized someone up and they've decided to be with them, are they still sniffing each other?

Yes? I think so. I think that has to be true.

I mean, I suppose when you get incredibly old, maybe not, or maybe you do.

I don't know, I haven't got there yet.

But also, you know, kissing and smell will tell you a lot about somebody's health.

M m.

And that's kind of important too, and you know, sort of that's actually one of the cues that people who worked on that side of things have really shown are quite important.

You know, it's kind of grossly obvious.

You know, somebody has got bad breath, you head for the bar as quickly as possible. You don't want to be with them, and you know, it's because, you know, it's kind of indicative of.

General physical health as much as anything, so you.

Tend not to want unless you're an angel in disguise, anxious to look after the you know, the sort of.

Second Yeah, okay, side note, I'm sorry, I have to tell the story. Once a long term boyfriend ordered a cream of roasted garlic soup at our favorite restaurant. This was probably fifteen years ago. I still remember how seeringly painful it was to smell him for at least a week after. It wasn't his fault, you know what. I just looked up the restaurant I had to. One yelper wrote about this soup quote. I thought I would be

When you're looking for a romantic partner, it's kind of not ideal for them.

Right now, Why do you think we're not utterly repulsed by kissing, given how dangerous it could.

Be from like a viral or bacterial standpoint.

That's because I think in the past, even the relatively close historical past, you didn't do these kinds of things very often with people outside your community, right, So it's part of the courtship and sexual activities that you engage in with people in general. Pretty much most of that

Carried you off as as war booty.

Yeah, things, This.

Is not an idea of relationship, you so, given the kissing is part of that kind of process of courtship leading up to to sex, you know, this is kind of probably not the ideal situation. So that means most of your kind of expectations really in your psyche is built around the fact that this is all part of your little local community. And I think it's probably so hardwired iness now because that's you know, we've lived with that for literally millions of years.

Have people been kissing for millions of years or is it relatively recent?

That is a complete unknown.

We will never know because it doesn't it's not the sort of thing that gets fossilized.

It's very hard to say.

I mean, I think most of these behaviors we have you can kind of trace back to their primate origins in some form, and primates will do these things. So things like laughter. You know, we share laughter with great apes, but it's slightly different the way we do it. And in turn, that laughter that the vocalization is sort of pant like vocalization we give when we laugh is really the old world monkey play vocalization.

It's a play invitation.

And it's just been sort of exaggerated and kind of ritualized progressively leading up to it to the way we use it now. So it's you know, most of our kind of behaviors have those sort of obvious origins in something primates, and that's true of something like kissing. I think it's done much more extensively by I mean even the bonobos, the so called pygmy chimpanzees, and.

The congo who are the kind of less aggressive and more friendly chimpanzees.

If you like bobos, by the way, are the sex they horn up free spirited monkeys, kind of like your friend who comes to brunch in a loose sun dress with no bra and you're like, good for you, girl, that's inspiring.

And are the only species.

Of any species of certainly of monkeys, napes, anyway, of mammals that have copulate face to face rather than front to back as they were, in the way that all other animals do. Even they don't engage in huge amounts kissing. They do a little bit, but it's not nobody's in the human league.

Wow, because manobos are known as the most amorous.

Really of the Yeah, yeah, that's right, but it's for that reason.

You know, it's because they have face to face compilation, and that's really very rare.

Then their behavior is really weird. They have sex with everybody.

Yeah, I've heard it's like burning man over in camp phenomena.

What it's worse because it's burning man with children.

That's a good point. I have some questions from listeners, can I ask you?

Yes?

Okay, But before we get to your questions, ologies patrons from patreon dot com slash ologies a dollar a month gets you.

In the club.

A few quick words from sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a charity of the ologists choosing each week. And doctor den Barr's grandmother was a Los Angelino and he asked that we find and donate to a charity locally which helps seniors, and so a donation this week went to ALA, which is Affordable Living for the Aging, which provides affordable housing and supportive services and alternate housing options for low income

For some answers Renee Jennings, who's the first time?

Question? Asker asked, We usually associate kissing with romance, but what is going on with the European way of greeting people with a kiss on each cheek?

Do we know where they came from?

Oh, that's just standard and Maori knows rub it. Oh you're just sniffing. Really, I mean we kind of do it well. I mean a lot of the Europeans don't even do a sort of slacky kiss sound. You know, it's just a head on one side, head on the other side, and you know, if you really call it three times minimum, you know, but it really is just getting close enough to be able to breathe in the spirit of the other person, see who they really are.

You can see. And they pick babies.

Up and bring them up to their face. And I've heard women so I just love the smell of newborn babies, you know, and you go, oh, yeah, you're just checking out who this is.

Come on, so I guess dogs do it on the other end, and humans do it on the face.

Yeah, yes, and that's very primating.

I mean, monkeys particularly Old World monkeys and apes are fascinated by each other's babies, and they're forever picking them up and nuzzling them and sniffing them and checking out. Basically, that's just checking out, you know, are you in my family or the other family.

Oh and side note, Swedish researchers found that the scent of dirty baby hats released dopamine in study participants, kind of like drugs would.

And now they look.

Into making a baby head nasal spray to treat depression. But what is the smell that we're huffing off of a baby?

Is it old milk?

Is it new skin? Is it promise?

Hope?

Nope, It's something called pretty And according to the Internet, it comes from the vernix caseosa, which is the whitish cheese like substance that coats a newborn skin at birth. Okay, so it is a little cheesy to want to smell a newborn. Also, patron Alissa asked about kissing newborns and giving them diseases, and I look this up in an article on babyology, said that if you have a cold sore,

It's your baby.

You do what you like. I kiss my dog's face constantly and I love her disgusting musky bullyon breath. It's like a drug, so gross, so precious. Jesswan asked, is it moremen to close eyes when kissing or is it different.

In different cultures.

That I have no experience.

I don't know, so, doctor Dunbar said in his observation, women tend to close their eyes more in Some research suggests that this is because of input overload, So in order to concentrate on tac dial senses, you might have to just throw visuals offline. Just eyes are going to put you on pause for a minute. Mouth is driving this boat.

If you close your eyes, you won't know, will you now? Boys ten Really, that's interesting. I have no idea whether that's peculiar to kind of Western kind of European culture, as it were, whether that's true other cultures elsewhere in the world.

Huh.

There are a ton of people who asked if there is a scientific term for French kissing, and why is the French that kissed this way?

And I believe in long, slow, deep, soft wet kisses. The last three days.

I didn't know whether it's the same term is used in any language other than English.

It maybe just to be in the English being rude about the French.

Okay, I thought that might leave some of you horny for answers. So on behalf of Patron's Anna, Elizabeth Ruby, Johnstone, VICKORYA. Wilson, Vince Alasha and A Valerie Hannah Black, El McCall, Heather Densmark, Kaitlyn Berger, Andrey Webber, Bennett Gerber, Rachel Ames, Haley, Everson,

Us?

Kissing? No, And after decades of calling it a lover's kiss or to kill with the tongues clunky at best. Finally, in twenty fourteen, they have an official included in the Dictionary term. It's galoche, which takes its name from an ice skate because it's all slippery, hopefully it's not that cold. Also es cargo, also slippery, already taken.

Although most cultures kind of kiss on the lips as it were, I don't know, it's all cultures around the world necessarily engage in sort of you know, tongue kissing as it were.

Yeah, I mean I feel like the French have kind of made out well with it. I mean, I feel like it's out of being a boon. What about some people asked why they might not like kissing?

Are there people who just aren't really into it?

I think it probably depends on how TecTile you are, so people differ on a kind of dune. Mention of attachment was known as the attachment scale. I mean, they have several dimensions to the attachment scale, but essentially they're measuring your warts and coolness in your personal relationships with

You know.

Dimension distinguishes between people who have the high density of endorphin receptors in the brain the low density. So it's like people who have a low dent people who have a low dentsitive endorphin receptors fill those up very quickly with a small amount of physical contact.

Oh side note, April is National Autism Awareness Month, and some folks on the autism spectrum have varied sensory sensitiveties. So, for example, some researchers think a light touch might feel uncomfortable because different nerve fibers carry different types of touch, So touch with pressure is carried really fast via type A nerve fibers, whereas light stroking types of touch moves more slowly across those C tactile fibers doctor Dunbar mentioned earlier,

And enjoy both.

It's very individual and the research is ongoing, but doctor Dunbar notes that a partner sensitivity is always something to consider.

One of the common features of AATs is you really don't like physical context.

It's it's it's.

Really disturbing for you. This is This is not a difference between the sets per sees. This is sort of just different styles of sociology. At the end of the day, the question I'm kind of inclined to ask is how many people have you kissed?

Right?

Most of us have not kissed vast numbers of people, So the likelihood of kissing somebody who doesn't match your style and requirements is pretty high. I think you have to, you know, get through an inordinate number of them in order to kind of go no, no, this one's a good one. So statistically speaking, you know, there's a fair chance that you know, the first I don't.

Know, it's thirty or whatever. Let's stay.

Turn out to be unsuitable from your product, perfectly suitable to other people.

That's just bad luck.

I'm a free bad luck, but good germs now a ton of patrons, including Heather Dunsmore, Ali Smith, Kristen dhn Urban and first time question askers Ginaviado, Hannessy, Charlotte and Vesper Clerks asked investment words. Is it true that kissing might have originated to share immunities between partners? Or was I like to So they wanted to know about microscopic makeout exchanges. If you kiss more people, would you have a stronger microbiome?

You're certainly exchanging I mean exchanging microbiome constantly with you every time new contacts physically touch somebody, so you know, and obviously much more is being exchanged through kissing. So the answer is yes. And people who live together and from the same family tend to have much more similar microbiomes. Your microbiomes has turned out to be much more important

For more on this, see the microbiology episode from November twenty eighteen with doctor Elaine Shaw, wherein we learned that ninety percent of our serotonin is made in our sloshy, squishy, pooey guts. So if you're in a bad mood and have a bug up your butt, it might just be because you don't have the right bugs up your butt. Yeah, so your partner can literally rub off on you.

Yes, your friends do terrible things to you.

Because there's some very nice research that was by some guys who are then at Harvard.

Most of them have moved on.

Showing that you know, your likelihood of becoming depressed or becoming happy, giving up smoking, becoming obese, et cetera, et cetera. Almost anything he cares to look at was determined by whether your friends, your people you sort of spent most time with, we're in that state or not.

So they know if your three nearest closest.

Friends were happy, you were much more likely to become happy, you know, in the year's time. Okay, if they got depressed, you are going to get not just your microbiotide, then you are spreading around the place. It's no psyche as well.

So not only can your invisible critters be contagious, but your.

Big moods are too.

How Why So I checked this out, and I found a paper by UC San Diego and Harvard researchers titled quote Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network longitudinal analysis over twenty years in the Framington Heart Study, which read quote, emotional states can be transferred directly from one individual to another by mimicry and emotional contagion, perhaps by the copying of emotionally relevant body actions, particularly facial expressions.

My god, that was before the dinosaurs. Lets extend back. Body can remember what it was like life.

Mine was very slobbery.

I remember being like, hmmm, I don't think that's how that's supposed to go. I was sixteen, black hair, combat boots, fully goth, and very unaware of technique. Also, I was so nervous I kept colping air and then I burped in his face. Sorry, high school boyfriend.

I'm sure that's all our first exper.

Does everyone Jessica Jansen wants to know, because you're an expert at behavior and court you know, courtship and kissing. Does everyone think you're an expert at at kissing?

Is that expected of you?

Well, I'm still waiting to be ask.

One day, doctor Dunbar one day.

So despite his wealth of published papers on the subject, this man will not kiss and tell he is a fortress of make outerie. It's admirable, it's frustrating, but it is admirable. Any movies or TV shows that have had really spot on or really terrible courtship or kissing scenes off the top of.

My head, it's kind of hard hard to answer.

Yeah, I mean, I still think in the end, probably the most brilliant piece of relationship stuff ever written with friends, So so okay, it's it's in the sort of Jane Austen level of kind of observation of people's foy balls and stuff like that, and in a funny sort of way, even the cricket.

I can't think of the the the the the program.

Now that's the science one, oh, big bang theory, big bang theory, right, it's just the dynamics of how the guys work together in that is so acute, you know, it's it's the writing of that and the observation of just human behavior is as good as they're observation. The writers, the script writers understanding and writing on the science, and you know, and they do some of the most extraordinarily good science popularization as probably you know, the cream of

I just want to see a quick load of Big Bang Theory showrunner and Young Sheldon co creator Steve Malaro, who is himself an ologite, Steve.

What's that hey?

Also for folks who have seen both Friends in The Big Bang Theory, does anyone feel like those two apartments connected by a landing kind of sharifibe? I always did, and out of curiosity and poor time management, I just looked it up and Friends and The Big Bang Theory Are you ready for this? Had the same production designer, a guy with the name of John Schaeffner. He was also responsible for the iconic Ratian sofa and floridian ease

What's just what's well?

Research is always hard work, right, so collecting data is extremely tedious, goes on for you have to do it for hours and hours and hours and stuff. That's the sort of one of the downsides of it. It's a kind of benefit to what you're watching is something that itself is entertaining.

But I think the real.

Irritating side of it is just trying to get stuff published, because you know, it's the you know, you're having to deal with people who seem not to live on this planet when you try and publish your beautiful new data.

And often it's because it's left field for them.

And I kind of in a way, because of where we work, which is, you know, on human behavior and social evolution in mammals in particular, you just sometimes wonder whether these people have relationships.

And what about what about your favorite thing about it?

Oh, it's just such fun, right, you know, I mean it really is. And also I mean, you know, it's a sort of curiosity thing about about how other people behave. But on the other hand, it's really like sitting in front of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, because if you're dealing with social evolution, you're not just doing some tiny little gene that does you know, when it works, does this,

So you get to have these real breakthroughs when all the data.

Yeah, yeah, and especially when.

There's no obvious reason why two bits of data should fit together. Hm, when you actually look at them from the right angle, as it were, suddenly you go, oh, actually they.

Do that aha moment finally at last.

It's almost like when you find someone that you actually fall in love with.

I'm sure, absolutely absolutely.

You know, us scientists suggest in love with our data, that's all.

And what about the work that you've done on social relationships. Do you think that it's made your relationships better in your life? Do you look too closely at them?

In some ways, maybe because you kind of have to have to think about relationships and why people are behaving in a subtle responding in a certain way. But also there is a sense in which the less you know the better, because these things, you know, if you know too much, you try and do it, force it, and then.

It doesn't work. Right.

The most important thing about relationships in the end is just going with the flow and letting it take its own course, and it will.

Work, and it will work naturally.

And this is why I get very, very irritated with mostly guys who come to me with got a new app or improving people's relationships, you know, and usually it's just reminding you when their birthdays are and things like that,

Yeah, so true. Well, thank you so much for all of the work that you've done. It's nice to know that people can just sniff each other slobber and then relax see what.

Happens exactly strangers.

Thank you so so much for doing this I hope this wasn't too painful.

I so appreciate your time.

I know how so you're so busy, and I just I realized that I fully begged you, so thank you for doing it.

Know your pleasure, my pleasure.

Well, get some sleep. Thank you for staying up late.

Okay, very good? Hy hye.

So find smart people and gently beg them to hang out on Skype and ask them stupid questions for the greater good of relationships everywhere, including mostly right now in your homes. Thank you to everyone who is sheltering in place right now. You are literally saving lives. Thank you. Links to doctor dunbars Ted talk and books are up on my website at alliwar dot com slash ologies slash filmatology. I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Hoo yikes.

Wow, I am kissing and I'm telling, but I'm not telling all of the information, So I feel like it doesn't count as a kiss and tell. Anyway, if you're in lockdown and you're missing people in smooches, just think about the eighty million bacteria that you're not getting in your mouth. Also, think of all the people who are breaking up because they have to live together so much. Gonna be a lot of single people after this, and then there's gonna be a lot of smooch in just saying.

Okay by bye.

Pacodermatology, homeology or do zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, pole patology, anthology, zeriology, elinology, ages.

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