Valentine's Day is the perfect occasion to reveal the astounding results of secret scientific research that the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has been conducting on the biochemical basis of romantic love.
For years, Hopkins has carefully concealed everything about this project. But over the weekend wild rumors of some remarkable scientific breakthrough swept through the medical laboratories in East Baltimore. By yesterday afternoon, the clamor had finally forced the dean's office to issue a terse statement acknowledging the research. But the medical school refused to disclose the exact nature of the scientific discovery "until we better understand the full implications for gender-related social interactions."
Confidential sources within Hopkins, however, have confirmed that the research has definitively answered the following critical question:
In identifying your True Love, which is a more reliable indicator, kissing or holding hands?
The research has focused on hands and lips because 85 percent of your brain tissue is associated with the functioning of these two parts of your body. In contrast, your sexual organs account for less than 1 percent.
The reason hands and lips take up so much space in your head is that both of them have many more sensory receptors than any other places on your body. That explains their critical role in mate selection. When your hands or lips come into contact with someone of the opposite sex, they can gather much more biochemical data than anything else you've got going for you.
Of course, they pick up different things. Everyone knows when you hold hands with a girl, your fingers are measuring body temperature, skin texture and moisture levels. Then when you kiss her goodnight, your lips gauge energy levels, responsiveness and physical endurance. My college roommate used to claim he could even estimate a girl's heart rate. So we don't need a lot of fancy research to tell us not to marry someone with clammy hands or cold lips.
What this new research at Hopkins has established is that our hands and lips not only collect very different kinds of data about each other's biochemical systems but that it's also absolutely crucial that you collect this data in the correct sequence in order to optimize lifetime mate selection.
Suppose, for example, you kiss a girl before you've held her hand. When your lips touch hers, the contact stimulates specific receptor sites setting off nerve impulses which swirl through her primary sensory afferents, synapse in her spinal cord, race up her dorsal column, and leap through her limbic system into her hypothalamus.
There, if your psychopharmacological signals match hers, the synergy releases catecholamines. Estrogen floods her system. So she grabs you in a mad passionate embrace, throws you down on her couch, and . . . .
If, however, the two of you are psychopharmacologically mismatched, her hormones remain chemically inactive. So she pulls away, kicks you out and throws up. Either way, your biochemical neuroreceptors have picked up some important clues about the relative probabilities of successful completion of mating tasks.
The information gathered by the lips, however, relates primarily to sexual reproductive potentialities. You see, kissing triggers rapid chronotropic heart action and euphoric cardiovascular agitation. These reactions typically continue for a sufficient amount of time to permit courting, copulation and impregnation.
Therefore, from the point of view of Darwinian biology, a kiss is the most reliable predictor of successful reproductive mating behavior. But what the Hopkins research has now proved is that if the data from kissing are accumulated before the data from hand-holding, then the process of spousal identification biochemically malfunctions.
In optimal progression, the touch of your hand on hers before there's any other physical contact will stimulate nerve impulses from the specific ventral receptors located on her palms. These impulses stream up her dorsal column and flow through her limbic system into her hypothalamus.
But there, instead of triggering aphrodisiacal brain chemicals, the impulses stimulate her vagus nerve to slow her chronotropic heart action and dilate the blood vessels in her central chest region. This produces soothing sensations around her heart muscle and releases endorphins into her hormonal system with a corresponding decrease in the rate of blood circulation which warms the surface of her hand.
The rising skin temperature on her hand is monitored by the receptors on your fingers and reported to your own hypothalamus which then releases endorphins into your hormonal pathways which trigger a sympathetic muscle contraction.
You squeeze her hand. She squeezes back.
This biochemically coded signal activates linked neuroreceptors in your hypothalamus and hers so that both biochemical systems have time to prepare themselves for the orderly reception and proper evaluation of the data which will soon be accumulated by the first kiss.
As the Hopkins' preliminary research report concludes, "Our findings demonstrate that the correct sequencing of diverse biochemical data accumulation by the specific site receptors on the hands and lips will not only ensure vigorous species propagation but will also trigger the instinctual cuddling behaviors which statistically characterize successful long-term human pair-bonding."
Tim Baker avouches that this article, whatever else it is, is neurologically accurate.