Evo-selitystä suutelemisen nautinnolle

Voisi ehkä olla niin, että suuteleminen vahvistaa miehen ja naisen välistä tunnesidettä. Isän ja äidin hyvät välit takasivat jälkikasvun selviytymisen. Äitin oli hyvin vaikea hoitaa yksin lapsia, hankkia ruokaa jne., joten tarvittiin mies avuksi.

Suuteleminen oli luolanaiselle ja -miehelle hyväksi, mutta sitä tehdään vieläkin, koska se mm. vähentää stressihomonien määrää elimistössä ja saa aikaan ns. euforisen tunteen. Suuteleminen siis tuntuu hyvältä ja se on myös hyvin tärkeä osa parisuhdetta, sillä suuteleminen luo intiimimmän siteen ihmisten välille.

Me emme myös suutele ihan kenen kanssa tahansa, joten sillä on elämässämme suurempi merkitys. Erikoista on myös se, että suudellessa ensimmäistä kertaa, ihminen tietämättään päättää, mitän mieltä hän on henkilöstä ja sopivatko he yhteen. Siihen liittyy mm. feromonit, eikä ihminen itse edes tajua tehneensä ko. päätöstä.

Joo, tässä oli minun pohdiskeluja. Saattaa olla asiavirheitä, mutta tällainen kuva minulla on suutelusta.

Miten suuseksi edistää lajin säilymistä? Se kun on sekä naiselle että miehelle ehkä se eniten nautintoa tuottava.

Mä uskon, että suuteleminen on evoluution jäänne niiltä ajoilta, kun ihmiset olivat vielä räpiköiviä lintusia pesässään ja lintuäidit ja isät kantoivat suussaan muikkuja lapsilleen. Tämä selittää sen, miksi ihmiset vielä tänäpäivänäkin vaihtavat kuolaa ja pullanmuruja hampaiden välistä keskenään ja myös sen, miksi ihmiset vielä tänäkin päivän 2000 vuotta kaiken jälkeen, tykkäävät yhä muikuista.

ainakin vauvoille on tärkeää nauttia imemisestä, jott onnistuvat imemään rintaa, ehkä suutelu on jäänne siitä.

Suuteluhan on kivaa kai lähinnä siksi, että huulet ovat herkät kosketukselle.

Ensin hieman psykologiaa ja perään biologiaa:
Uskon että kyse on kaiketi tästä: lapsen kehityksessä on kausia, jolloin vauva oppii nautinnon kautta kaikenlaisia asioita, esim. syömään, sisäsiistiksi ym. Nämä kehityskehtävät tapahtuvat erilaisissa vaiheissa, joista olette ehkä kuulleetkin: oraalinen, anaalinen, genitaalivaihe... Hyvin pienenä lapsi tutkii kaikkea suullaan, lienette nähneet vauvan laittavan suuhunsa kaiken, minkä saa käsiinsä. Lapsi saa nautintoa tästä (eihän hän sitä muuten tekisi) ja oppii samalla kaikkea ympäröivästä maailmasta.
Huulissa on mahdottoman paljon tuntohermoja, joten totta kai ihminen tuntee nautintoa huulien koskettamisesta suhteessa enemmän kuin jonkin muun alueen, jossa ei ole niin paljon tuntohermoja. Miksi emme siis suutelisi, koska siinä ollaan yhtäaikaa että koskettaja, että koskija.
Uskon myös, että tuossa feromoni-jutussa oli asiaa.
Evoluutiota ja eläimiä tässä ollaan, mutta eihän suuteleminen ole ihmislajin säilymisen kannalta tärkeää - niin kuin ei myöskään halailu tai hellyys. Koska ihminen kehittyi niin pitkälle, että ihmisestä tuli eläin, jolla on tunteita, on ymmärrettävää, että myös muut asiat(ei vain yhdyntä), jotka tuottavat mielihyvää, nousivat tärkeiksi seikoiksi. Ihmisen jälkeläiset ovat syntyessään kovin "vajavaisia" verrattuna muihin eläinpoikasiin, jotka hyvin pian jo pärjäävät omillaan. Ihmislapsi on taasen todella pitkään syntymänsä jälkeen avuton. Siksi on kai ollut evoluution kannalta viisasta, että parittelevien välille on kehittynyt luja tunneside, että poikanen saisi hyvän kasvuedellytyksen. Tunteet tulivat siis evoluution avuksi, ja suuteleminen taas osaksi tunteiden jokapäiväistä näyttämistä. (Varmaan juuri sen takia, että huulet ovat erittäin tuntoherkkää aluetta.)
Tämä oli vain omaa pohdintaani muutamien tosiseikkojen valossa. En todellakaan ole absoluuttisen varma teoriani oikeellisuudesta, mutta kun lähdin miettimään asiaa, tulin tähän ratkaisuun.
Ehdottoman mielenkiintoinen aihe mietittäväksi. Lisää kannanottoja odotellen...

Suuteleminen nostattaa dopamiini- ja oxytociinitasoja. Se edistää parisuhteen kiintymistä ja pysyvyyttä. kiintyminen on lajillemme tarpeellista koska pentujen kasvattaminen kestää 20 v.

Lue allaoleva jos jaksat.


What is Love Anyway?

An Evolutionary Perspective on Couples Sexual Health
By Helen Fisher, PhD

Dr. Helen Fisher is an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of four books on sex, love, and marriage. Her most recent book was published this year by Henry Holt and it is called Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.

...
Dr. Helen Fisher come on up. [audience applause]

Dr. Fisher: Good morning. I am delighted to be here. ...



So, I am going to start out by talking about my research on love and then move on into the impact on sexuality. What I have done with my colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and SUNY Stoneybrook is to put 40 people who were madly in love in a functional MRI brain scanner ...

“What ‘tis love?” Shakespeare said. I think we have been pondering this since our ancestors sat around their campfires a million years ago.

I divide love into three different brain systems.

1.The first is lust, the craving for sexual gratification. Pavlov and *Auroticon* on eternal thirst and infinite ache. *D. Jordan* called it an intolerable neural itch. It is associated largely with testosterone and many other chemicals but certainly centrally testosterone. There is generally sometimes no object to the sex drive. You can feel it for a range of partners.

2.The second brain system that I think evolved from mating and reproduction is romantic love. That passionate love, obsessive love, being in love, infatuation. I think they are all slightly different brain varieties of the same thing. It is associated with elation, heightened energy, focused attention, obsessive thinking, you can’t stop thinking about the person, intense craving for a particular human being. And I long had the hypothesis that this was associated with elevated activity of central dopamine and/or norepinephrine in the brain and low levels of serotonin.

3.The third brain systems is attachment. The sense of calm and security that you can feel with a long term partner. Other scientists have associated this with elevated activity of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in specific circuits in the brain.

I think that all three of these brain systems have a different brain circuitry and a different brain chemistry. They have different feelings and behavior patterns. They evolve for different reasons. The sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for almost anything at all or at least a range of things. Romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. And attachment evolved so that we could tolerate this individual at least long enough to rear a single child together as a team. [audience laughing]

These three systems are connected in many ways. For example, when you fall in love you can suddenly feel an intense interest in somebody. Three weeks ago he was just another nice guy, now suddenly even the way he moves his arm or smiles or gets off the bus becomes intensely sexually attractive to you.

The reason is, at least in part, because elevated activity of dopamine in the brain can elevate activity of testosterone, the hormone of desire.

But is the reverse true? Can you copulate with just a friend and then suddenly fall in love with them? Not always. Most liberated American adults have had intercourse with somebody that they never fell in love with but it can happen.

And I think it is largely, at least in part, because elevated activity of testosterone associated with the sex drive can increase activity of dopamine in the brain. And in fact sexual activity in many mammals does increase dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, part of the reward system of the brain, as much as 50%. This is one of the reasons I tell my students at Rutgers, “Don’t copulate with people you don’t want to fall in love with because it may just happen to you.” [audience laughing]

You also might feel attachment to this individual. Orgasm draws up levels of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in the brain associated with attachment.

The interaction of these three different brain systems can also help to explain why sexual activity tends to decline in a long term marriage.
Because the hormones of attachment, Oxytocin and Vasopressin, can suppress testosterone.

So, as you feel more and more attached to somebody you can be suppressing testosterone levels associated with sex drive. You can also elevate, Oxytocin and Vasopressin, associated with attachment can also interfere with dopamine and norepinephrine pathways in the brain, suppressing feelings of romantic love.

I think this is in part why people in very long relationships have a hard time maintaining romance. And in fact there is only one actual clinical way to sustain that romance and that is to do novel things together. Novelty drives up levels of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. This is one of the reasons that vacations or just doing anything different can be so romantically and even sexually stimulating because as you drive up the dopamine you are driving up the testosterone and they go together.

These three systems lust, romantic love, and attachment interact in many ways but they can also operate independently of each other.

In fact, you can feel deep attachment to a long term partner while you feel madly in love with someone else, while you feel the sex drive for a host of individuals unrelated to either partner. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from feelings of attachment for one person to wild infatuation for somebody else.

It is as if you have a committee meeting going on in your head [audience laughing] as you are having these feelings.

Plato once said, “When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.” We wouldn’t be able to talk to ourselves if these systems were totally related. I think that all of these systems evolve. I think the sex drive evolved to get us out there looking for almost anything.

Romantic love evolved to enable us to focus our mating energy on just one individual and fall in love. And attachment evolved so we could form this pair bond and act as a team. I think these three systems became unconnected from each other so that our ancestors could form a pair bond with one individual and take advantage of what we say politely in my discipline, EPC, or extra pair copulations with other partners.

There is adaptive, I am definitely not advocating adultery, but for billions of years those men who were adulterous would have had more children, for millions of years those women who are adulterous would have had more resources for the children that they had. If you spread more genes into the population those children survive.

You are going to carry along with you, unconsciously, whatever it is in the male and female brain associated with adultery. We are actually beginning to know some of the genetics of fidelity.

In short we have evolved a double reproductive strategy. A tremendous drive to seek sex, a tremendous drive to fall in love, a deep need to attach to a partner, and also the tendency for adultery, divorce, and remarriage.

Now, we are not puppets on a string of DNA. We can control our impulses. Over 50% of Americans do not divorce, many more remain faithful to their partners, but inherent in our human nature are conflicting drives. Drives that can bring great joy and great sorrow to our lives.

The brain system that I have been studying is romantic love. I started in 1996 by taking a look at all the psychological literature to see what happens when you fall in love, to see if I could find some of the brain circuitry of this.

The first thing that happens when you fall in love is somebody takes on what I call “special meaning”. As a truck driver once said to me, “The world had a new center and that center was Maryanne.”

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Love consists of over estimating the differences between one woman and another.” [audience laughing]

Then you focus your attention on this individual. We can list what we don’t like about a sweetheart but we sweep that aside and focus on what we do. Intensely heightened energy, real euphoria, mood swings into despair when things are going poorly, adversity tends to heighten the passion, and this is dopamine related and I am going to go into this a bit.

I coined a term for this. I call it frustration attraction. What a bad deal. The moment somebody doesn’t like you you like them harder, and in fact I know how this operates now in the brain. Real separation anxiety, when things are going poorly, and intense desire for sex and sexual exclusivity, what we say in my business, mate guarding.

all animals guard their mates but the three major components of romantic love are you focus your attention on this individual, you obsessively think about him or her, and you crave emotionally and you are highly motivated to win this particular individual.

So, I came up with a hypothesis. These various traits led me to the hypothesis that romantic love was associated with a specific brain chemistry.

Now, many chemicals are involved but primary among them I thought were dopamine and norepinephrine because these are associated with elation, energy, focused attention, and motivation to win a reward, and with lower levels of serotonin, this is important, lower levels of serotonin because obsessive thinking is regularly associated with low levels of this neurotransmitter.

So, I knew that romantic love was found in every single society on earth for which we have looked every where in the world where there is data.

We have now put 20 men and women who were madly in love and their love was returned into an MRI and 20 men and women who had just been rejected in love.

We have not analyzed those who were rejected in love but we have looked at those who were madly in love and their love was returned.

We found many results but among them we found activity in the ventral tegmental area in the midbrain. This is the brain factory for dopamine.

It not only makes dopamine but it spreads dopamine to many brain regions. We also found activity in the caudate nucleus, the dorsal caudery tail and body. Both of these regions in the brain are integral to the brains reward system.

The system associated with pleasure and focused attention and the motivation to win a reward. And in fact we did not find activity in the classic brain regions that govern emotions. As a result I changed my thinking about what romantic love is.

I came to believe that this is the fundamental human drive, a mating drive, a psychological and physiological urge, a need, a motivation, an instinct that evolved specifically to drive men and women to court a specific partner and indeed I think it is stronger than the sex drive.

...

We found many other things but I am just going skip that and simply say that most important romantic love engages a very wide range of brain systems but basic to it is this reward and motivation system in the brain.

I think this evolved. I think that it evolved many millions of years ago. I think that other animals have an equivalent of this. You see, no animal will copulate with anybody.

Not an elephant, not a gerbil, not a rat, nobody will copulate with anybody. They all have preferences. These preferences are associated with activity of dopamine in the brain and they display many of the characteristics of romantic love.

They follow doggedly, they don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they focus their attention, they express intense energy, activities that people express when they are madly in love. So, at some point I think during human evolution this basic brain system for the mammalian attraction evolved into human romantic love.

I go into this because it is important, I think, to understand the broader implications of how the sex drive interacts with other brain systems. I am going to continue now to talk about a particular trend in sexuality that truly disturbs me and came from my understanding of romantic love.

In 2003, in the United States, 213 million prescriptions for anti-depressants were written. The vast majority were for serotonin enhancing drugs. It is well established, as Jennifer mentioned, that these drugs can cause diminished sexual desire, delayed sexual arousal, and muted or absent orgasm and I and colleague of mine, psychiatrist Andy Thompson, have come to believe that these sexual side effects not only jeopardize your sex life but can also jeopardize your ability to find the right partner, to fall in love, to stay in love, and to sustain a marriage.

Because when you knock out the sex system you affect evolutionary brain mechanisms for courtship, romance, and attachment.

For example, and most importantly, elevated activity of serotonin associated with these serotonin enhancing medications suppresses the dopamine pathways in the brain.

Dopamine is the fundamental neurotransmitter associated with romantic love.

So, when you raise serotonin at the synapse and effect these dopamine highways you are changing your threshold, your ability to feel the elation of romance.

Now, I am not telling anybody to not take these drugs. If you are going to kill yourself or somebody else there is certainly every reason to take them but Americans are taking them long term, for many years in a row, for simple psychological well being.

Those are the people that I think are in jeopardy of not being able to fall in love. In fact, this is why people take these SSRI’s. They take them to blunt the emotions but when you blunt the emotions you blunt your ability to fall in love.

SSRI’s also suppress obsessive thinking, which is what you want when you are terribly depressed but it is also another central component of romantic love.

Serotonin enhancing anti-depressants and the simple lack of sexual activity can jeopardize romantic love in marriage in other more subtle ways. As I mentioned to you, orgasm produces a flood of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in the brain.

Oxytocin is associated with maternal bonding, social bonding, and attachment. They call it the satisfaction hormone or the cuddle chemical. This is why people as they make love feel very warm, almost a very cosmic union with one another, because these neurohormones have increased.

So, when a woman takes a serotonin enhancing anti-depressants or stops having sex for other reasons and fails to achieve orgasm she fails to stimulate in herself and her partner neural mechanisms associated with attachment.

From a Darwinian perspective orgasm also is a primary device by which women unconsciously assess a mating partner. Women don’t reach orgasm with every partner that they have.

It was long said that therefore orgasm was therefore a faulty mechanism that women just weren’t well designed the way men were and it is now come to be called the fickle female orgasm and it is now believed that it is an adaptive mechanism that enables women to distinguish between those partners who are willing to spend time and energy on them, “Mr. Right”, and those who are impatient and lacking empathy, “Mr. Wrong”.

And when women take anti-depressants or don’t have orgasms they jeopardize this ability to assess the commitment level of a partner.

Women also use orgasm to assess an existing partnership. Women tend to have more orgasms with somebody who is a long term sweetheart and at the onset of an orgasmia this can destabilize a marriage.

A good example, I am getting more and more people from around the country who write me about this, and one example is the woman who is 35, married, recurrent depression and anxiety disorder, starting to take SSRI’s, diminished libido, absent orgasm, and she began to conclude that she didn’t love her husband.

She kept her feelings to herself for five years and kept taking the drugs and finally decided to divorce him. Then she was switched to an anti-depressant that had no side effects, her orgasmic response came back, she decided to stay with her husband, and now they have a child.


Also, when you don’t copulate with somebody you don’t get their seminal fluid. Gordon Gallop and others have established that seminal fluid contains dopamine and norepinephrine associated with romantic love, Oxytocin and Vasopressin associated with attachment, and testosterone associated with the sex drive.

It also has FSH, LH, and other things associated with female sexual cycling. These don’t all go through the membrane barrier but they certainly could contribute to sex drive, romantic love, attachment, and healthy normal sexual cycling.

And when you don’t take them you are less likely to feel good. As a matter of fact Gallop has more recently done a study of women who were directly exposed to seminal fluid as opposed to those who used condoms and indeed they found that seminal fluid had an anti-depressant effect. [audience laughing]

...

Audience Member: How did you define or measure whether somebody was madly in love because I always thought that was kind of a Western concept?

Dr. Fisher: It is much more than a Western concept.
Let me tell you exactly how I did it because these MRI machines are very expensive and we need technicians, we need radiologists, you know, at least five people are involved.

You gotta make sure that you have people who are madly in love before you put them in that machine because of the time and energy and money involved.
So, what we did was we, first of all I looked at the psychological literature and I have a list of 20 characteristics that are associated with romantic love. T

hey are associated with romantic love not only in American/Western society but in one study of 166 cultures around the world a friend of mine looked for evidence of romantic love and found it in every one.

For example, the oldest love poems go back 4000 years to the Sumarians.
I have love poetry from Japan, China, Aztec’s, American Indians, and on around the world.

So, the love poetry gives various actual examples of some of the traits of romantic love. But nevertheless I talked to these people. What we did was we had a flier and on the flier it read, “Have you just fallen madly in love?”

And then they would come to us and we would screen them. You can’t be taking anti-depressants. You can’t have any metal in your head. You can’t be claustrophobic, etc.

And then I would talk to them and the first thing I would ask them is, “How long have you been in love?” I didn’t want them to be in love more than a year. I wanted them crazy, absolutely crazy.

And my second question was what percentage of the day and night do you think about your sweetheart.

And then generally say 95%, I can’t stop thinking about him or her. I also looked for all kinds of sleeplessness, loss of appetite, focused attention, craving, separation anxiety, a host of various traits.

And I had to make very sure that I felt these people were madly in love. And indeed in every single one of them the part of the brain associated with craving did light up.