Ramachandran offers one reason that feet might be a common target of ardor: the part of the brain that receives signals of podiatric touch is right next to the part receives genital stimulation. “Maybe even many of us so-called normal people have a bit of cross-wiring,” he wrote in his 1999 book Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, “which would explain why we like to have our toes sucked.”