You’re kissing your other half and you suddenly decide to open your eyes – weird, right? But why is it weird?
Normally when you kiss someone, you look at their lips, close your eyes, and go for it. All of us do this instinctively and our ancestors have been doing it for hundreds of years regardless of how experienced or inexperienced to kissing a person is.
Scientists have been looking into what this reason behind humans closing their eyes to kiss is, and recent findings have given us some interesting information about ourselves and the art of kissing. To put it simply, it’s so we can focus on that kissing.
We may like to believe that we’re good at multitasking, but the simple truth is that we really aren’t. When humans multitask we separate our focus, and when we separate our focus our senses have a lot of work to do in order to keep on understanding both tasks at hand, Which is why many experts will say that multitasking doesn’t actually do that much good for us. We like to believe that we can remain focused equally on both tasks, but this simply isn’t true – when we multitask we become less efficient at both tasks at hand.
Our senses are consistently multitasking – our eyes take in and process what’s around us, our skin tells us the temperature and what we’re touching, our ears listen and process sounds coming in, and our noses take in the smells around us to signal us if something is wrong. All of this happens at the same time – but if you were to turn off one of these senses, the capabilities of your other senses would heighten because that’s one less thing to focus on. This can be seen in people who have become deaf, blind, or both – there are significant increases in the functionality of their other senses.
Basically our brains do a lot of work – both consciously and subconsciously, turn one thing off, more power goes to whatever is left on.
Kissing uses our sense of touch. When we’re going to kiss someone, all we want is to lock lips with them and feel them kissing back. We can tell then that kissing focuses in on our sense of touch, relying on essentially only this sense. So, when our eyes are open, we’re using energy and splitting our focus to process and take in what’s around us. When we shut our eyes, we shut off that sense. Shutting off that sense allows us to focus entirely on the sensation of kissing – something most (if not all) people want.
So basically, we close our eyes when we kiss so that we can focus wholly on kissing – which is both strange and romantic at the same time (kissing is pretty weird when you think about it too much). It’s odd the things that our bodies do that we don’t even understand, and it’s odd we have to put so much research into understanding these things – though it is fascinating.
Next time you’re locking lips with your other half, you may think back to this article, but just remember that if you do think about this – you’re multitasking and you’ll be inadvertently cutting out some of the sensation of the kiss, so all of you just be careful now that you know how it all works. Now go kiss and tell your other half!