You teach us this morning that love hormones, pheromones are just a myth …
And yes, at the risk of disappointing, it’s like Santa Claus, pheromones do not exist, if we are to believe the very serious newspaper “Le Quotidien du Médecin.” Articles on pheromones abound on the internet, but also in certain scientific journals! But for an INRA scientist, we neither produce nor smell these mysterious scents with exceptional powers, pheromones.
Remind us what are pheromones? We have talked about elixir of love or love at first sight enzyme.
Pheromones are chemicals secreted by most animals and perceived by another individual of the same species. They act as messengers between individuals and play a role in notably sexual attraction. They are secreted among other things in sweat. So much for science and more poetically, the best known example is that of the moth which detects a female from miles away and has only one obsession: to fly towards her! So 1time disappointment: no such secretion in humans, so no response as stereotypical and uncontrollable at least linked to its pheromones.
So no love potion, but we cannot deny that smells have a great importance in our … attractions and our behavior!
And you just said the word smell! but not pheromones. Body odor is the result of bacterial degradation of secretions, for example axillary, but we are far from these volatile bodily compounds that would make us lose our minds. So we must not deny for all that a sensitivity to sexual odors demonstrated by scientists: for example areas of the brain are activated in women who are made to smell male hormones.
And in animals too, odors participate in the choice of the sexual partner.
In rodents, this is especially useful for them to choose partners that are the most distant genetically, that is to say towards congeners that do not have the same odor at all: these are survival reflexes of the species because ‘we know that inbreeding causes too many malformations. So to find and seduce or keep your partner, don’t wait for the perfume with aphrodisiac properties, nor the green light from pheromones, there are a lot of other signals … let’s put them in the green, but let’s not let ourselves be led by the tip of the nose !!!
Reference
From an article in the Doctor’s Daily / ROLAND SALESSE
INRA, olfaction neurobiology and imaging modeling unit (NOeMI), Jouy-en-Josas.
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