Jon Bowen

But why — with all of today’s sophisticated therapies — go for the hole? The idea is to pump up your “brainbloodvolume,” a term coined by Dutchman Bart Huges, the guru of modern-day trepanation. Back in the psychedelic ’60s, at the height of the age of mind expansion, Huges decided to expand — literally — his own brain. Your level of consciousness, goes Huges’ theory, is directly related to the volume of blood in your brain. Babies have naturally high brainbloodvolume, being born with a soft spot at the top of their heads — the fontanel — that gives the brain room to pulse. (When you look at a baby’s head, you can actually see the pliant tissue at the fontanel throbbing with the baby’s heartbeat, pumping oxygen through the brain.) Within the first year, though, that soft tissue hardens into bone.

And therein, says Huges, lies the problem. Once the fontanel seals off, your brain has no proper vent through which to breathe. To make matters worse, the upright stance you adopt as a toddler allows gravity to pull blood away from your head — the beginning of a lifelong drain. Pulsation decreases. Brainbloodvolume plummets. You get lethargic, estranged, depressed. What can you do?

You can dabble in one or all of modernity’s modest remedies, or you can do like Bart Huges and get yourself trepanned. By opening up that hole — a sort of do-it-yourself fontanel — you reverse nature’s wayward development and return your skull to its original condition. As a result, trepanners say, you’ll be happier, more energetic and less prone to crippling bouts of ennui. You’ll ascend to the child’s plane of acute consciousness from which you disembarked to enter the lowly malaise of adulthood. Basically, you’ll feel like a kid again.

Just listen to Pete Halvorson, a Huges disciple who now directs the International Trepanation Advocacy Group (ITAG): “With trepanation, you can willfully and deliberately accelerate your brain metabolism. You have a higher level of consciousness. You’re optimistic and upbeat. You look at problems as a source of entertainment. You’ll feel good your whole life.”

Sounds dreamy, but Halvorson wasn’t always so blissed out. In his early 20s he experienced a period of deep, dark depression. (“The door slammed shut on me,” is how he puts it.) He tried psychotherapy, he tried various medications. Nothing worked. Then he met Huges, got wise to the brainbloodvolume theory and, in 1972 in Amsterdam, he trepanned himself, making an 8 mm hole in his head with an electric power drill.

Now 52 and running a tree farm in Pennsylvania, Halvorson gives a fairly detached account of the procedure, but all the gory details can be found in “Bore Hole,” a book written by Englishman Joseph Mellen about his self-trepanation. Mellen describes drilling into his head with a hand trepan, and then: “After some time there was an ominous sounding schlurp and the sound of bubbling. I drew the trepan out and the gurgling continued. It sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed out. I looked at the trepan and there was a bit of bone in it. At last!”

The ensuing state of mind, according to Halvorson, is unmitigated bliss. “When I first trepanned myself, I thought — and I know this sounds selfish — but I thought, ‘Only a few people deserve this.’”

Halvorson no longer endorses self-trepanation “because we’re so close to being in the hands of competent surgeons.” But competent surgeons disagree. The medical community collectively refuses to recognize trepanation as a legitimate therapeutic practice. Dr. William Landau, a neurologist in St. Louis, sums it up this way: “There is no scientific basis for this at all. It’s quackery.”

Dr. Robert Daroff’s response is even more concise. “Horseshit,” he says. “Absolute, unequivocal bullshit.” Daroff is a professor of neurology at University Hospitals of Cleveland and editor in chief emeritus of the journal Neurology. “This is a crackpot notion that’s not worthy of my time. And not only that — it’s dangerous. You expose your precious brain, you remove God’s covering, there’s a risk of infection and all sorts of other problems.”

Brain doctors seem to view this invasion of the cranium’s hallowed realm as a violation of some universal taboo. More to the point, they don’t approve of amateurs like Halvorson dipping their fingers into the neurochemical soup. But they readily agree on one point: a hole is the starting point for all neurosurgical procedures. Trepanation is performed, for example, to evacuate hemorrhages and to relieve pressure in the cranial cavity caused by cerebral ulcers. But, for neurosurgeons, the hole is a means to an end, and they put the bone back in place. Daroff says, “It’s just to gain access.”

So there’s no benefit to having a hole for the hole’s sake? The proof, for Dr. Bruce Kaufman, is in the neurological pudding. “Organized neurosurgery would approach it from a scientific basis. Are there case reports to show that this is a beneficial procedure? Not that I’m aware of.”

Kaufman, an associate professor of neurological surgery at Washington University School of Medicine, says that over the past couple of decades neurosurgeons have experimented with a therapeutic procedure similar to trepanation. They tried making holes in the skull to treat slit ventrical syndrome, a brain malady brought on when shunts inserted to drain excess fluid end up robbing the brain of its natural buffer. “The brain is stuck in this tight little box,” Kaufman says. “We tried bilateral decompression to give the brain more room.” Bottom line? “It didn’t work. The procedure was abandoned.”

Giving the trepanners momentary benefit of the doubt, Kaufman says, “Let’s assume there’s something to their theory. You create a hole in the skull. The scalp scars down to the tissue that covers the brain. This tissue is called the dura, and it has the consistency, basically, of a shirt.” So, after trepanation, the only thing protecting your brain is a shirt? “It’s dangerous,” Kaufman says.

But Halvorson thinks there’s an ulterior motive for the pharma-psycho-medical complex’s stand against trepanation. “Trepanation restores you to a youthful state where you’re happy and upbeat, and that diverts attention away from Prozac and protracted psychotherapy.” In other words, if you’re a shrink or a peddler of feel-good drugs, universal bliss is bad for business. “I don’t have a problem with pharmaceutical companies making money. What I don’t like is something that’s beneficial, like trepanation, being excluded.”

The consequence of that exclusion struck Halvorson hard last year, when his wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis. “She was emotionally destroyed by her downward progression. We hoped trepanation would slow the process. I wanted her to experience the state of great relief that trepanation brings.” But despite repeated requests from Halvorson and his wife, her doctors refused to perform the procedure. They didn’t want to get involved in such a non-standard process, Halvorson says. Last March, his wife died.

Nowadays Halvorson is a tireless crusader for trepanation. He uses the ITAG Web site as a pulpit from which to preach the gospel according to Bart Huges, and last April, to bring trepanation before a wider audience, he subjected himself to an appearance on the Howard Stern show. (“Actually, it was a lot of fun,” Halvorson says. “Howard was quite intrigued. Afterwards he said, ‘Come back with more people with holes in their heads.’”)

And more people will be getting holes if Halvorson gets his way; he and his ITAG cohorts — about 60 trepanned people worldwide — are lobbying to make trepanation available from surgeons on demand. “We’re interested in getting the American Medical Association to make a public statement. They won’t go on record. They don’t want to jeopardize their reputation,” by condemning trepanation when the procedure might turn out to be beneficial.

“I have no problem taking ridicule from the general public,” Halvorson says. “But I expect doctors to act as scientists. They have a professional responsibility to respond to this from an academic viewpoint. In the back of their minds they know that something good happens when you open the skull. Eventually they’ll come around.”

So, while Halvorson and the brain doctors duke it out, we’re left to ponder the uncertainties. Is trepanation the final solution to the riddle of the mind-body dichotomy? Or is it a load of medieval hooey hauled into the ’90s by new age outlaws? Is trepanation, to use Howard Stern’s words, “a cry for help”? Or are we, the solid-skulled majority, just one hole away from nirvana?

If the neurologists are right, seven orifices in your head is plenty. If Halvorson is right, the kingdom of eternal contentment is waiting to be entered through a hole in your skull. And now, according to Halvorson, getting that hole is about to become a lot easier.

“We’ve located a surgeon in the Western Hemisphere,” he says, “who is willing to trepan anyone over the age of 18 who signs a consent form. Right now there are a dozen people in the U.S. chomping at the bit. Within six months, a few dozen will be trepanned.”

When that happens, Halvorson will make his triumphant return to the Stern show, with a troop of the freshly trepanned in tow. And when America tunes in for its daily dose of Stern’s loudmouthed potty sass, they’ll hear instead the soft, pacific voice of Halvorson as he extols, one by one, the blessings of trepanation.

Perhaps Mellen said it best in “The Great Brain Robbery,” his ode to trepanation: “All your prayers won’t save your soul/Adults, you need a hole.”

A ramrod-stiff penis here, a jiggling breast there, a vague thrusting of hips that you can’t quite trace to two distinguishable human bodies — scrambled porn is a moving mosaic of sex. It can be a little hard to follow the action, as you squint into the flickering screen, but you’re captivated in a way that you never are with straight porn, because you have to envision with your mind’s eye the parts you can’t quite see. And that’s what makes the scrambled stuff so much more fulfilling: It leaves more to the imagination.

I don’t much like unscrambled porn. With its worn-out story lines, its so-bad-it’s-funny acting, and its mechanical humping and sucking, straight porn bores as often as it excites. It’s the too-much-information problem; it doesn’t leave you any room for filling in the blanks. But scrambled porn, like a finely wrought minimalist short story — imagine Raymond Carver erotica — gives you just a scattering of small but telling details. You catch a flash of breast here, a vague hint of penetration there, and then you flesh out the story line from your own mental storehouse of fantasies. It’s interactive titillation, much like the give-and-take of sex itself.

The similarities to real-life sex don’t end there. At its finest, scrambled porn achieves a kind of cinéma vérité effect. Compared to the unscrambled stuff, it bears a much closer resemblance to the actual experience of a sexual encounter. When you’re in the act, you never see yourself and your partner from the camera’s-eye viewpoint. You never observe things from that far-off, objective perspective. There are no slow, steady pans, no pull-back shots of the action. Everything is jumbled and in your face, herky-jerky and dislocated. As you flail around in the sack, you may — in a fleeting moment of clarity, like the interludes of clarity in scrambled porn — catch a glimpse of your partner’s torso writhing above or below you, a gaping mouth near yours, a leg extended at the very edge of your peripheral vision. But you’ll get no slow-motion sequences or tidy freeze-frames. Sex is scrambled, and if pornography aims for verisimilitude, it should be scrambled too.

If it weren’t for a few right-minded justices on the Supreme Court, we might have lost the gift of scrambled porn forever. Last year, in a landmark decision for late-night voyeurs, the court fought off the morality watchdogs in “United States vs. Playboy Entertainment Group.” The case emerged from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law by President Clinton, which called for an end to scrambled porn. When Sen. Dianne Feinstein pushed an amendment through the Senate that would force cable companies to either scramble their adult programming completely or banish it to the wee hours, the companies waved the First Amendment flag. The court ruled 5-4 that scrambled porn should not be removed from the airwaves, triggering a collective sigh of relief from Picasso porn connoisseurs everywhere.

What’s bizarre is that, despite its obvious inferiority to scrambled porn, unscrambled porn still carries more cash value in the marketplace. In a world of properly assigned values — a world where elementary school teachers pulled down high six-figure salaries while Britney Spears sang for nickels on the street — in a world like that, cable companies would feed their unscrambled smut over the airwaves for free and charge a premium for access to scrambled porn.

Maybe we’re already headed in that direction. In small ways, scrambled porn is starting to receive its due attention. In the opening scene of “American Pie,” last year’s cinematic paean to teen libido, Jason Biggs’ character enacts one of the all-time sacred rituals of male adolescence — masturbating to scrambled porn. The magazine Nerve recently featured an artfully packaged photo gallery of scrambled porn on its site, and pundits are starting to weigh in on the Constitutional ramifications of restricting scrambled porn.

In my fantasy, it won’t be long before cultural critics in the humanities departments of Northeastern universities are devoting entire courses of study to the deconstruction of Picasso porn. Art film houses will put on scrambled porn festivals in sold-out theaters, and bespectacled grad students will slump in their seats tugging at their goatees, trying to mentally fix Picasso porn’s place in the storied history of cinematic art.

In the meantime, though, aficionados of scrambled porn like me remain consigned to late-night surfing, squinting into the screen at those disembodied images tumbling like stray clothes in a dryer.

Of course the reason that these fragments of sliced-and-diced sex slip through the scramblers onto my TV screen in the first place is that the scrambling systems used by cable companies are far from perfect. Porn peddlers could funnel some of their profits into developing better scramblers, but why would they do that? They’re hoping that those teasing glimpses of flesh will compel us to fork over the extra cash for the full smorgasbord of unscrambled smut.

But I say no thanks. I’ll take my sex scrambled.

A poster at my bank applies the pressure tactics to exceptionally ominous effect. An attractive four-color poster — promoting the bank’s financial planning services — features a young, pigtailed girl working furiously at her homework, penciling out a tough math equation under the glare of her desk lamp. The ruthless caption bullies mercilessly: “She’s doing her part … Are you doing yours?”

Am I, in other words, as panicked as I should be about amassing a small fortune to pay for my kid’s education? Well, yes; yes I am. My daughter is only 13 months old, and I can already feel the future’s financial death grip clutching at my throat.

The numbers, as accountants are fond of saying, speak for themselves. Average college tuition has more than doubled in the past two decades, while median incomes for families with college-age children has risen only 22 percent, according to the College Board, the age-old juggernaut that administers the SAT.

And the National College Resource Association says we can expect tuition to continue to outpace earnings. According to the NCRA, the total cost of four years at both public and private colleges is expected, once again, to more than double over the next 18 years.

All these statistics tend to blur into a vaguely sinister mélange of facts and figures, so I decided to take a look at what the math means to my family. With one hand on the computer mouse and one hand clutching my heart, I used the tuition calculator on U.S. News and World Report’s Web site to tally the cost of sending my daughter for four years, beginning 17 years from now, to the University of Virginia, a fine public school right here in my home state. My computation accounted for tuition and fees at in-state rates (assuming a tuition inflation rate of 6 percent), room and board, with some additional cash thrown in for books, supplies and personal expenses. The grand total? $127,446.

That’s a fairly horrifying figure in its own right, but just for the sake of further self-torture I decided to ring up another estimate based on the prospect that my daughter — who at 13 months is already exhibiting signs of cognitive wizardry — will develop sufficient brainpower to get her into the Ivy League. What would it cost us to send her to, say, Harvard in 2017? $410,527.

The numbers are so humongous, I find myself staring at them glassy-eyed, dumbstruck by their sheer immensity — like a solo climber standing at the foot of Everest contemplating its cloud-haloed peak. From my middle-income viewpoint, it’s hard to know where to start saving to accumulate such a mountain of money. The numbers are unapproachable, intimidating, borderline crazy.

But it wasn’t so long ago that the cost of college education was reasonable, even affordable. In-state tuition for one semester at the public university I attended in Virginia, in 1988, cost less than $1,000. I could write a check out of my humble savings account to cover the whole thing.

That’s right — I paid for most of my own college education, undergrad and grad, footing the bill with income from odd jobs and the usual streams of financial aid, which I’m still paying off. (Yes, Sallie Mae, the check is in the mail.) Back in my dormitory days I felt a little resentful of college roomies whose parents catered to their every financial whim, including the open-ended MasterCard account for beer and gas.

But I don’t hold this against my parents now; on the contrary, paying my way through college furnished me with a go-getter’s steady work ethic that I now see lacking in some of those old trust-funded college slackers, a few of whom still can’t shake the notion that someone ought to be paying their way through life.

So, unlike some parents, I’m not adamant about bankrolling my kid through college. If she has to put in some hours at one of America’s great retail chains to score some cash, or if she has to take on a little debt as she racks up her B.A., it’ll do her good. When she forks over her own cash for tuition, she’ll demand her money’s worth every time she walks into a classroom. She’ll pay attention; she’ll learn more.

Still, I do the feel the instinctual pull to provide, and I want to do everything I can to lay the financial foundation for her education. So I did some research on the various savings plans. At first glance, the most appealing option seems to be the Uniform Gift to Minors Act — called the Uniform Transfer to Minors Act in some states — which would allow me to invest under my child’s name while acting as custodian of the account. According to current IRS regulations, I can sock $10,000 tax-free per year into a UGMA account, and — here’s the bonus — earnings on investments are taxed at the child’s rate.

But there’s one catch. If I invest in a UGMA account, every cent of the savings will become the sole property of my daughter the moment she turns 18. And if she decides to blow the cash on some badass SUV, or new breasts, or a yearlong outback jaunt with her heavily tattooed boyfriend, there’s nothing I can do. Under UGMA rules, if I try to withhold the money, I’ve breached the trust terms and the kid can take legal action to get the cash.

So the question boils down to this: Do I trust that my darling 1-year-old will develop into a darling, motivated young adult who, placing a premium on the merits of higher education, will funnel her UGMA earnings straight into tuition? Or do I hedge my bets — squirrel away the money in a nice, safe savings account that will really suck taxwise but over which I’ll enjoy dictatorial control — based on the prospect that she could turn into a wild-eyed hell-raiser?

In the end, like most financial investment questions, it’s not a financial question at all — it’s a question of faith.

These days my daughter is just starting to learn to walk, striking out on her own first high-risk endeavor. With knees locked and arms outstretched she lumbers along like a mini-Frankenstein, and as I cruise along behind, my own arms outspread to shield her from hard surfaces and sharp corners, it’s always a temptation to sweep her up and carry her on to wherever she’s headed. It would save me some anxiety and save her some bumps and bruises.

But that would strip all the adventure out of it, too — for her and for me. Half the fun of having a toddler, after all, is turning her loose on her wobbly legs and standing back to watch in wonder as a sudden, new grace begins to take hold of her, and she starts making her way steadily through the world, clearing all the obstacles I worried would knock her down, and I stand there, shaking my head, feeling silly for not giving her more credit.

Catherine Morris, a Kirklees librarian and the program’s organizer, says the program isn’t designed for people with severe psychiatric illness, but for those troubled by depression or mild anxiety.

“Working in the library, I meet people all the time who say that reading particular books has cheered them up,” Morris says. “Once someone came in and said ‘I really enjoyed this book because it was about somebody more miserable than I was.’ The idea is that bibliotherapists will talk to people, find out what kind of things they normally like to read, why they are stressed or ill, and then prescribe them an individual list of books.”

So where can you — the average depressed, stressed-out, anxiety-ridden American — find a good bibliotherapist in this country? Sorry, but you probably won’t find one at all. Officials at the American Library Association (ALA) say that librarians in the United States aren’t accustomed to handing out prescriptions for literary medicine.

“It’s not something we’re doing on this side of the pond,” says Mary Jo Lynch, the director of ALA’s Library and Research Center. “It’s certainly not something that we’re using in any of our committees or sections at ALA. Librarians here have never called themselves ‘bibliotherapists.’ We don’t use that title. It isn’t something that we feel we’re qualified to do.”

Lynch raises the inevitable question: Is your average librarian really qualified to dispense treatment for depression and anxiety — even if the medication being prescribed is strictly literary? Lynch says the Brits are going out on a shaky limb. “This is a very litigious society,” she points out. “If you hang out a shingle and claim that you can cure people, you’re making yourself vulnerable (to lawsuits).”

Still, Lynch — like all self-respecting librarians — believes that great literature can have a genuinely curative effect on the reader, and though librarians in this country may not brand themselves “bibliotherapists,” they do practice book-healing on a looser, less formal basis.

“We maintain lists of books that we think might help people in different situations,” Lynch says. “The goal for librarians is to know this stuff in case someone comes in and wants it.”

While the British program is a groundbreaker of sorts, the concept of bibliotherapy per se is nothing new. You can trace it way back to ancient Greece, when the words “Medicine for the Soul” were inscribed over the door to the Library at Thebes. And the Greeks, famous for their tragedies, really knew how to plot a story for maximum therapeutic impact.

“It goes back to Aristotle’s idea that tragedy has a cathartic effect on the audience,” say Brian Bremen, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin who teaches a course on the relationship between literature and healing. “The experience purges you and leaves you a healthier person.”

Purging may have gone out of style with the vomitoriums, but the basic read-to-cleanse tactic remains intact to this day. “The more modern approach,” Bremen says, “is that by reading, you learn things about yourself, and this knowledge leads to a healthier approach to behavior.”

The term “bibliotherapy” — most simply defined as the use of books to help people solve problems or adjust behavior — first surfaced in a 1916 issue of Atlantic Monthly, when essayist Samuel Crothers put forth the idea of prescribing books for patients with various ills and gave his brainchild a label.

The term began to get bandied about heavily in the United States in the 1970s. Back then, bibliotherapy programs focused for the most part on children; librarians in schools would try to help students tackle various personal issues with the help of a few good books.

If a fifth-grader’s parents got divorced, say, the librarian might slip the kid a novel that happened to feature — yeah, you guessed it — a child-protagonist with divorced parents. In the book, the fictional kid learns to cope by relying on peer support, personal resourcefulness, old-fashioned spunk, etc., and then (if everything goes according to plan) the fifth-grader identifies with the character, realizes he isn’t the only kid in the world with a busted-up family, watches the character work through the problem, gains insight into his own situation — and ultimately uses the book as a model for coping. Issue resolved. That’s the idea anyway.

But does it work? Before you swap your Prozac for Dickens, you might want to consider Richard Riordan and Linda Wilson’s 1989 review of the literature on bibliotherapy. Their review, published in the Journal of Counseling and Development, found that most studies on the subject have shown mixed results, especially when it’s used as an isolated treatment. The article concluded that bibliotherapy works most effectively when teamed with other forms of therapy — medication and counseling.

Of course one of the underlying assumptions of bibliotherapy is that the act of reading itself is a naturally interactive process. By placing yourself in the shoes of a story’s major players, goes the notion, you can extrapolate from their experiences and apply their ways of dealing with their fictional ups and downs to your own life. Heal thyself, via the canon.

Maybe, maybe not — but sometimes the mere act of absorbing top-notch literature can have a positive effect. Anyone who reads good writing has experienced the feeling of uplift and reassurance that comes from consuming a delicious slice of prose — like this one, for instance, from the opening of Kent Haruf’s 1999 novel, “Plainsong”:

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform.

Sure-footed, well-cadenced writing like this just makes you feel better, brighter, more hopeful. Maybe the act of reading releases some kind of endorphins in your brain — a reader’s high.

But can Kent Haruf — or Tolstoy, Melville or Austen — actually cure depression? Can they rid you of anxiety? Un-stress your mind? “I’m skeptical of the ability — the literal ability — of literature to heal,” Bremen says. “But there’s another part of me that says, ‘Who knows?’ So much of medicine is reliant upon rhetoric.”

So what kind of books might help an unhappy person feel better? “I’d take the allopathic approach,” Bremen says. “I’d choose children’s literature. Happy kinds of stories. ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,’ ‘Harry Potter.’”

Melissa’s cathartic kiss definitely made her feel better, and it might even have been good for her health.

Adrianne Blue’s 1997 book “On Kissing” outlines the physiology behind the fireworks. Kissing is a highly orchestrated maneuver. You lean in, tilt your head to avoid a nose collision, and the muscles in your shoulder, neck and back are called into play as the brain’s motor center gears itself to the delicate task of steering the lips and tongue. Your lips are loaded with nerve endings, and as your mouth meets your partner’s, impulses fire through your neural network. Your brain tells your lungs to work harder, your heart to beat faster, your salivary glands to pump moisture into your mouth. Your jaw, the one movable bone in the human skull, hinges open as you extend your tongue.

Then, as tongues touch, neural signals go zipping along your spine, to your pancreas, your adrenal glands and pelvic nerve. Your arteries and veins dilate — your heart rate shoots up, maybe doubles. Your lips swell, and you get that pleasant tingling sensation in your private parts. The blood rushing to your skin’s surface makes you feel fevered, your face flushed. You may begin to sweat.

This ritual is what anthropologists call pre-copulatory activity, what sex manuals call foreplay and what Marvin Gaye calls getting it on. And getting it on is good for your health. In his book “Superimmunity,” Dr. Paul Pearsall says that sex in the context of a loving relationship boosts chemicals in your body that protect against disease. Doctors believe that physical touch itself boosts levels of the hormone oxytocin. Among other things, oxytocin boosts feelings of affection and promotes caretaking behavior, and synthetic oxytocin has been used to treat depression.

From an aerobic standpoint, kissing is a workout: According to the 1991 Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex, a passionate kiss burns 6.4 calories per minute. (This compares to 11.2 calories per minute you burn jogging on a treadmill.) It takes only two muscles to purse your lips into a simple pucker, but a serious French kiss activates all 34 of your facial muscles, and the highest level of serious making out, properly done, engages every muscle and tendon in your body.

Kissing can slow the aging process — it tones your jaw and cheek muscles, reducing sagging. Kissing is good for your teeth — your mouth waters when you kiss and all that saliva destroys plaque, preventing tooth decay.

Beyond the health benefits of the sexual kiss, the therapeutic power of a Platonic or familial kiss — its healing magic — can be traced to the accident-prone days of childhood. When you fell down and skinned your knee, when you pinched your fingers in the door jamb, when some schoolyard blooper launched you into a new realm of pain and humiliation — when you hurt yourself as a child, what did your mother do? She kissed the hurt away.

The chaste, nurturing kisses between parent and child build lifelong trust. “Kissing the pain away creates an emotional tie between mother and child that eases the suffering,” says Dr. Hyman Tolmas, clinical professor of pediatrics emeritus at Tulane University School of Medicine. “It’s better than medication at times. Everybody wants to be loved. It builds self-esteem.” He believes that children who have parental love demonstrated to them early on “grow up to be good parents themselves.”

Dr. Seth Prosterman, a clinical sexologist in San Francisco, agrees: “The displays of affection that parents do in front of their children are important as modeling. Family hugs, kisses — it’s all part of the nurturing that makes you feel secure.” And between romantic adults, says Prosterman, “Kissing is powerful in many different ways. A kiss can be healing, nurturing, bonding. All those psychological benefits translate into feeling healthier physically.”

According to Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist in St. Louis, frequent kissing can lead to holistic healing. “The social support of a kiss is a buffer against stress — pain, too,” she says. “This showing of affection is a way to bond. And the need for human bonding is as basic as the need for food.”

That’s a uniquely fitting metaphor — the kiss as soul food — because anthropologists believe the custom of kissing originated in humans when cave-dwelling mothers would transfer food from their own mouths to their babies’ mouths, like birds, and adults learned to mimic the act.

From that Stone Age start, the kiss has evolved into a zillion modern variations and crossbreeds. Now we have the Platonic peck on the cheek, the steadfast lip-lock, the probing French kiss, the Hollywood air-kiss, the blown kiss that flies from the palm of your hand to its destination across the breezy abyss and the vacuum kiss that, according to William Cane’s 1998 book “The Art of Kissing,” is performed by “sucking the air out of your partner’s mouth and lungs.” Sounds a little hazardous, but Cane says, “All the best kisses make you lose your head and cause a visceral reaction.”

Charles Darwin saw kissing as natural — he claimed that we all have an innate desire to smack lips with our loved ones. According to Helen E. Fisher’s 1992 book “Anatomy of Love,” 90 percent of people worldwide practice kissing in some form, and 85 percent of Americans polled in a survey by the Revlon company said passionate kissing is the most sensual activity around. “The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana,” that old bedside standard for innovative lovemakers, devotes an entire chapter to kissing, including the sweet notion of expressing your romantic intentions by kissing your lover’s reflection in a mirror — metakissing for the postmodern smooch deconstructionist.

In fairy tales, a well-timed kiss can turn a frog into a prince, jolt Sleeping Beauty out of a prolonged coma and cure a witch of chronic ugliness. In ancient Rome, custom had it that a kiss from your lover before you die would preserve your soul and keep it alive forever on your lover’s lips.

A kiss is good medicine for most of humanity’s lesser ailments, and sometimes it can be something more — an instrument of deliverance. Think of Melissa the unhappy news writer, overworked, understimulated, bored to tears with the status quo, burned out on everything. Now see her on the deck of that sailboat at midnight, cruising the Galapagos, locked in a lingering kiss with the seriously swarthy gentleman. The sea glows. The constellations pinwheel across the sky. The kiss goes on and on. Nothing else matters.

“I felt transported,” Melissa says. “I felt totally removed from everything I’d left behind. It allowed me to shed all those layers of unhappiness and dreariness. I had a feeling of security and confidence. I knew everything was going to be all right after that. I felt free to do anything.”

Blue Gene’s first assignment will be to solve the biological conundrum that scientists call the “protein-folding problem.” In the human body, proteins are the bundles of amino acids that control all cellular processes, carrying out basic functions like metabolizing food. Each protein folds into a three-dimensional shape that determines its function, but even a slight error in this folding process can lead to disease.

Once the protein-folding puzzle is solved, scientists will be able to repair defective proteins in sick patients and create new “designer proteins” to combat disease. Pharmaceutical companies will have the ability to make high-tech prescription drugs customized to the needs of individual people, and doctors will be able to respond more rapidly to changes in bacteria that cause them to become drug-resistant.

“There are a bunch of diseases that stem from incorrect folding, including Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and prion diseases like mad cow disease,” says Dr. S. Walter Englander, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “The problem has been that technology, as of now, has not been able to deal with the complexities of amino acids.”

Scientists have tried using computers to model protein folding, but according to Dr. Samuel Landry, a biochemist at Tulane University School of Medicine, today’s computers aren’t quite up to the task. “Massive computational power has made it possible for researchers to get predicted structures that occasionally resemble the real thing, but the devil is in the details. Structures good enough for drug design are still a long way off.”

IBM executives are banking on Blue Gene to speed up the process. This will be the first time that a machine of such immense power has been unleashed on a single scientific problem, and Dr. Paul Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research, believes that Blue Gene is destined to change the way doctors do business in the future. “One day,” he says, “you’re going to be able to walk into a doctor’s office and have a computer analyze a tissue sample, identify the pathogen that ails you, and then instantly prescribe a treatment best suited to your specific illness and individual genetic makeup.” After attacking the protein-folding problem — considered one of science’s “grand challenges” — Blue Gene will take on other problems, such as weather forecasting and airline safety.

IBM’s machine will contain more than a million processors, each capable of a billion operations every second — that’s one quadrillion operations per second. The entire unit will consist of 64 racks six feet high, each holding two-foot boards loaded with processor chips, and it will occupy 2,000 square feet.

Mapping out the structure of a protein has been slow going for scientists laboring away in their labs since the ’60s, so how do they feel when a corporate giant like Big Blue comes swaggering into the fray, vowing to crack a medical mystery that has baffled scientists for years? Is there any animosity from the ranks?

“Well, they’re not going to do it alone,” Englander says, with a laugh. “They had to enlist chess masters to develop Deep Blue. They’ll have to deal with the whole protein community on this. It’s not like they’re flexing their muscles and saying, ‘You assholes step aside, we’re going to solve this problem for you.’”

Of course, building a supercomputer to save human lives makes great P.R. for IBM, but Englander suspects that the company has a core of self-interest beneath the show of altruism. “They understand that by putting money into computer development, there’s going to be all kind of side products,” he says. “It certainly will put them in a good position in the market.”

But it will also put researchers and doctors in a good position to trounce disease. “If it works,” Englander says, “it’ll be a great thing.”