Can our brain smell opposite sex? Study Finds Brain Reacts To
Sex-Specific Chemicals
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 28, 2001; Page A01
Certain chemicals similar to the male and female sex hormones trigger
distinctive brain activity when sniffed by the opposite gender, providing
the strongest evidence yet for the existence of human "pheromones,"
scientists reported yesterday.
Brain scans of two dozen volunteers in Sweden found that a part of the
brain involved in regulating sexual behavior lit up when women were
exposed to a substance similar to testosterone, while the same brain area
in men lit up when they were exposed to a substance similar to estrogen.
The research, which convincingly demonstrated that the effect of these
chemicals on the brain is not because of their odor, will be of interest
to romantics, pharmaceutical companies and savants of armpit chemistry.
Although human pheromones have long been embedded as real in the public
imagination, spawning a bustling market of perfumes and potions for
suitors seeking to turn on the opposite sex, scientists have long debated
whether they existed.While those scientific questions persist, the new
research suggests that at least some human behaviors may be subliminally
influenced by invisible chemicals with no obvious odors.
"It's great, it's very exciting and very interesting," said Noam Sobel,
a neuroscientist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies
pheromones.
No visual or auditory signal that he could think of, said Sobel, has
ever been known to produce so sharp a distinction between men and women.
"Is it proof that these are pheromones?" asked Sobel. "No, but it is
another block in the wall and it is a block in the wall that closes up the
hole."
While animal studies have shown that the part of the brain activated in
the new study -- the hypothalamus -- is associated with reflexive sexual
responses, it remains unclear whether humans necessarily respond in
similarly predictable ways.
"I'm leaving open the possibility that these and other compounds may be
human pheromones but one should not walk away after reading this paper
that these two compounds are the [only] human pheromones, and that one
affects females and the other affects males," said Charles J. Wysocki, a
neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
"There's much much more work that needs to be done."
Besides their role in sex, pheromones are widely involved in regulating
other behaviors in the animal world. Animals, for example, mark territory
using pheromones. Scientists have also found a specific piece of tissue in
the nasal passageways of animals called the vomeronasal organ (VNO), which
is what they use to sense pheromones.
There has been some evidence that humans are similarly influenced by
pheromones. Women living in groups, for example, begin to tend to
menstruate together -- an effect that some scientists believe is caused by
pheromones. But scientists have been unable to identify any specific
chemicals that clearly act like pheromones, or convincingly prove that
humans have active VNOs.
Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm exposed a dozen
men and a dozen women to a variety of smells. One was plain air, another
vanilla. The two others were the testosterone- and estrogen-related
compounds. While the subjects breathed the chemicals for a minute, the
researchers conducted scans of their brains.
None of the chemicals seemed to be particularly striking in terms of
odor. Participants rated all about average. Men did not show any striking
brain response to the testosterone-related chemical and women's brains
were likewise blase to the estrogen-related compound.
"One would expect that females would find the female compound more
pleasant but there was no difference," said Ivanka Savic, a neurologist in
Karolinska's department of neuroscience. "There was no [smell] difference
between males and females. This means it is not the smell component that
is responsible for the sex-specific activation. It's something else."
Whatever the something else, it caused an activation in the part of the
brains of both men and women that is involved in regulating sex -- the
hypothalamus, Wysocki said.
Activation of the hypothalamus in monkeys, according to published
research, elicits penile erections in male monkeys and copulatory behavior
in females, said Savic, in a telephone interview.
"In rodents, the females start ovulating as soon as they smell a male
pheromone," she said. "There is no way that pheromones are going to induce
such a reflex in humans because we are so much more complicated."
Among other differences, humans have a much larger frontal cortex than
most animals, and it is the part of the brain that is involved in many
higher cognitive functions, including inhibition and self-control.
Of the two chemicals studied, said Bernard Grosser, chairman of the
department of psychiatry at the University of Utah School of Medicine,
androstadienone, the testosterone-related compound, was shown to reduce
pulse rate, increase temperature and produce relaxation in women in other
studies. No obvious sexual effects were observed.
The estrogen-like compound produced similar, but not identical, effects
in men. Feelings of well-being and relief from tension could be part of
humans' sexual responses, of course, and Grosser pointed out that other
chemicals may also be involved in regulating human sexual behavior.
Savic, who published her research in this week's issue of the journal
Neuron, said that it was interesting that the men and women in her study
chose "animalistic" associations when asked to describe the two chemicals.
Some said it smelled "sweaty" or like "an animal."
"One of my female subjects said this smells like my sister's old
sanitary napkins," said Savic. "To me, that's very illustrative."
Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5340-2001Aug27.html
Why does odor help prevent incest?
Thu Aug 22, 2002 10:23 AM ET
Dislike of family members odors was part of nature's way of
preventing incest, by making people less appealing to their closest
relatives.
LONDON (Reuter) - Family members tend not to like the way each other
smell, researchers say, speculating that the unpleasant stink of your
closest relatives may be one of nature's ways of discouraging incest.
In research described on Thursday in Britain's New Scientist magazine, a
team at Wayne State University in Detroit recruited 25 families with
children aged between six and 15, and gave them T-shirts to sleep in and
odorless soap to wash with.
They were told to keep the T-shirts in plastic bags. They were later asked
to sniff two T-shirts, one worn by a family member and another worn by a
stranger.
The researchers first tested whether family members could recognize each
other.
They found that mothers and fathers could usually tell when they were
smelling their pre-adolescent children, with mothers being slightly better
at it than dads, but they could not say which child was which.
Children younger than nine -- with the notable exception of sons who had
been breastfed -- generally could not recognize their mothers, while older
children could. All the children recognized their fathers.
Interestingly, whether or not they recognized which T-shirt belonged to a
family member, volunteers usually said they far preferred the smell of the
stranger's shirt.
Mothers particularly did not like the smell of their children, and
children had a strong aversion to the smell of their fathers. Children of
the same sex were not offended by each other's smell, but children of
opposite sex were.
Researcher Tiffany Czilli said that she believed the dislike of each
other's odors was part of nature's way of preventing incest, by making
people less appealing to their closest relatives.
Other family issues could be at work too: the particular aversion that
children have to the smell of dad could also be a sign of children trying
to grow up and be independent.
But Dustin Penn of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City warned that
asking people about their preferences could be unreliable.
"Just because people say they 'prefer' something doesn't mean they'll act
in a preferential way," he said.
Source:
http://story.news.yahoo.com
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