Further Pheremone Findings
Posted by Cordite on Fri 14 Feb 2003 - 11:09
Neurobiologist Lawrence Katz and his colleagues have been conducting research on the pheremonal responses of mice, measuring the impulses from individual neurons in their brains.
Katz's team were able to observe the activity of the "auxiliary olfactory bulb", which receives information from an "auxiliary nose" that detects pheremones.
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According to a study conducted in 1985, approximately 70% of adult humans have a vomeronasal organ (VNO), although traditionalists have held that this is vesitgal.
More recent findings have discovered that humans have a genome which closely resembles the pheremone receptors of mice.
These studies are not new, and in fact the VNO is also known as Jacobson's Organ, for its discover Ludvig Jacobson, who described its presence in 1813.
I recall areading an article in Psychology Today several years ago in which they studied which men women find attractive. Given that each individual has different genes that determine resistance to various pathogens, women found that men whose genes were most complimentary to their own (i.e. which would produce the most resistant offspring) were most attractive to them. The men with the most similar (least complimentary) genes were the least sexually attractive, though the women often felt a non-sexual, family-like friendship with them.
The above findings were for women who were not pregnant or recent mothers and who were not using any chemical means of birth control. If the women were pregnant or recent mothers, the results were almost the exact opposite, indicating a natural desire for women in these circumstances to seek out the company of family or that which is comfortable and familiar. Perhaps most interesting of all was that women on the pill, or using other chemical/hormonal means of artificial birth control, were more like the pregnant women in terms of which men they found most attractive.
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