The Myth of Human Pheromones

Let's talk about human pheromone research. I'm more recent years, there was a study where heterosexual women sniff dirty undershirts belonging to men without seeing their faces. Then they would look at the guys and rate their attractiveness.

The men with who smelled the most attractive when wore dirty undershirts ended up having the most different gene complex of the women who found them the most attractive. So maybe it's something to do with sweat glands. Well, there's a steroid and a derivative of testosterone called androstadienone.

What We Know About Human Pheromones

Men have more of this than women and scientists thought for a while that perhaps this testosterone derivative is a pheromone. Andreas Keller, a geneticist at Rockefeller University discovered that really kinda depends. Depending on your olfactory genes, you could either find that chemical pleasant, repulsive or you would just not even be able to detect it at all. It basically depends on your nose.

Remember that pheromones are characterized as these smells that we somehow smell but we aren't processing them in our noses. Unfortunately, there is no absolute scientific proof that human pheromones really exist. And this is because as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute points out, compared to insects whose behavior is stereotyped and highly predictable, mammals are independent, ornery and complex. Learn more at http://astrobiosociety.org

There's so much more to love and sex among humans than just your chemicals. Tristram Wyatt of Oxford University has been doing a lot of research on pheromones. Wyatt said that attraction is so much more than just visual and social signals since we are emotional people.

Natural Pheromone Production

However, Shape magazine recommends that couples work out together. And not to shower immediately because you continue to release attraction boosting hormones for an hour after you've finished exercising.  Learn about the best products http://sundowndivers.org

They also recommend not to put perfume on your neck, breasts or genitals because that will hide the important pheromones that drive men wild. They also recommend not to wear underwear because your pheromones will more easily be dispersed into the air and be picked up subliminally by the primitive part of his brain.

The Great Pheromone Myth

Richard Doty, director of the University of Pennsylvania is a smell and taste research center wrote the book, "The Great Pheromone Myth". He says it's all mythology. It plays into how we want there to be something more primal and, and special about the attraction we have to someone.

The science can be a little tricky to untangle because they're not saying that there aren't some kind of chemical signals that go on between people. And we have yet to really nail something down for certain regarding human pheromones. For example, people's reactions to that compound in sweat vary from person to person. Learn more at http://pheromones-work.weebly.com

Pheromone Study on Homosexuality

There was one Swedish study from 2005 that had an interesting hypothesis about pheromones. This related to the hypothalamus and possibly a biological basis for homosexuality. The study looked into the effects on the brain of two chemicals. There was a testosterone driven male sweat and estrogen compound in women's urine. They were both thought to be potential pheromones. These two chemicals activate the brain in a very different way than normal scents do. It's something more subliminal.

So anyway, the estrogen-like compound just activated the typical scent receptors in women and it didn't do anything special. But in men, it lit up the Hypothalamus, a region of the brain that governs sexual behavior. Now for the male sweat chemical, that activated the hypothalamus in women, but just the usual receptors in men. However, they repeated the study and included gay men in as a third group and that had interesting results. They found that gay men responded to the two compounds in the exact same way that women did.

In other words, it looked the same area of the hypothalamus was activated in women and they tested this in gay women. And for some reason, the researcher said that the results needed further assessment. This was needed before they could offer any types of conclusions. And so again, this is just another example that we're seeing some kind of behavioral or physiological change. However, they're not exactly sure what genetic components are causing it.