Unless you are REALLY not feeling it or constantly vigilant, much
like sneezing, kissing is nigh on impossible to with your eyes open.
Up until now, you've probably accepted it as 'just one of those things'. After all, who wants to get overly-analytical about kissing?
But as a study on vision and tactile sensory experience carried out by Royal Holloway, University of London revealed, there is one very good reason why we do it.
Or, as the study more scientifically concluded, our grey matter
struggles to process another sense while also concentrating on the
visual stimuli - so looking at the object of our affections while
kissing them.
However, before you sign up for any future studies on the same topic, it was in fact conducted
without people kissing.
Instead, participants had to do visual tests while their response to something touching their hands was measured.
The tests involved letter-searching tasks which varied in difficulty, the Independent reported, and their response to a small vibration being applied to one of their hands was measured.
Academics
Polly Dalton and Sandra Murphy, from the university, shared their
findings in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance.
Apparently, participants were less responsive to the sense of touch as their eyes did more work.
So for other activities necessitating a tactile sense -
like kissing, dancing and sex - people tend to want to focus on touch, rather than have visual distractions.
It means we can concentrate our energy on the task at hand, and give it one hundred per cent of our effort.
And having been evolved this way for millions of years, it would be a bi off-putting to change now.
