A report that’s turning heads
Who says science is just beakers and physics equations? It also has a hopelessly romantic side, which might explain why a German researcher has been sneaking around international airports and beaches, tracking human kissing habits.
The results of his study were published Thursday in the journal Nature, sandwiched between equally salacious articles on sediment runoff in Australia and the use of plant hormones to promote “root growth by modulating gibberellin response.”
The kissing investigation centered on whether people tilt their heads to the right or to the left when locking lips. Psychologist Onur Gunturkun spied on 124 couples in the U.S., Turkey and Germany before concluding that humans are twice as likely to tilt right to avoid bumping noses with their beloved.
Which raises an important question: What happens when a right-tilter dates a left-tilter? Is the relationship doomed? Gunturkun doesn’t say. Nor does he firmly resolve the issue of why most people lean right in the first place.
“I wasn’t interested in studying kissing because of kissing,” Gunturkun said in a press release about his work. “I wanted to understand the rules that transform our brains into asymmetrically functioning entities.”
See, hopelessly romantic.
Gunturkun’s theory is that the right tilt is a holdover from the womb. “Human embryos and newborns also show a preference to turn their head to the right,” he says, although they do so by a vastly larger margin.
But that explanation is kinda boring. Therefore, we think additional studies need to be done. For example, Gunturkun only observed kissers in Northern Hemisphere nations. But what about smoochers below the equator, where water swirls down the drain in the opposite direction from which it swirls in the North? Are couples in Uruguay more likely to lean to the left when making out?
Or perhaps the head tilt is a cultural trait. Americans drive on the right side of the road, so maybe they lean right when going in for a kiss the same way they bear right when approaching an oncoming vehicle.
Finally, and most importantly, why hasn’t anyone studied the right-left preferences of vampires? Which side of their victims’ necks do they bite most often?
As it turns out, sidedness is a mysterious phenomenon. A 1995 study of human hugging in the Journal of Genetic Psychology revealed that most people place their head over their partner’s right shoulder when hugging -- seemingly the opposite of what happened in Gunturkun’s kissing study. The only exception was men hugging other men. In that instance, the results were evenly split between right and left.
Scientists have also examined the way adults cradle infants and discovered that women almost always position the baby’s head to their left, whereas men show no preference.
Intrigued, we took an informal survey of 29 women and 30 men on how they hold hands with their sweethearts. By a 4-to-1 margin, the women said they preferred to be on their partner’s left side, holding his left hand in their right. Four of the women were switch-hitters: “I use whichever hand isn’t holding the martini,” one joked.
Men, however, were almost evenly divided on the issue, although slightly more favored using their left paw to hold a mate’s hand. “That leaves my right hand free to block any punches,” one said.
Whether a person was right- or left-handed seemed to have no bearing on his or her preference, a result that was mirrored in the studies of kissing, hugging and baby cradling.
In the general population, right-handed humans outnumber lefties 8 to 1, Gunturkun says. Right-footedness and right-eyedness (the eye you use when aiming a camera or peering through a telescope) dominate their left-side counterparts 2 to 1.
Which brings us to our final unsolved mystery: During routine physicals, when doctors ask male patients to turn their head and cough, do the men turn right or left?
