From a news article i
found online today....
Science sheds new light on secrets of physical attraction
Chris Cobb,
CanWest News Service
Two new studies have been focusing on body scent, or body odour in less polite
company, and using sophisticated brain scans on homosexuals and heterosexuals while simultaneously wafting sweat of
numerous volunteers under their noses.
The sweat came from the bodies of a cross-section of sexual orientations.
Bottom line: Natural body odour, or pheromones, play on our subconscious and are key in determining who we find
attractive, but like natural gas, they have no smell. At least, in well-washed persons they don't.
Gays who
volunteered to take part in the experiments were especially adept at sniffing out the scent of other men and,
according to brain-scan results, were stimulated by those same odours that send heterosexual women all a twitter.
Which sort of makes sense, doesn't it?
Two institutes, Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center and the
Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, have been working simultaneously on these sniff tests and have come to similar
conclusions.
The Monell team gathered 82 heterosexual and homosexual men and asked them to sniff the armpit sweat
of 24 donors representing all basic sexual denominations. There is no word on how much they were paid to do this,
but it couldn't possibly have been enough.
So the study showed that gay men like the smell of other men in
general, but according to their brain scans, were able to detect, and were especially stimulated by, the armpit
odour of other gays. It is hardly surprising, then, that the smell of gay men was the least liked by heterosexual
men, women and lesbians.
Lead Monell researcher Dr. Charles Wysocki said of his team's study: "Our findings
support the contention that gender preference has a biological component that is reflected in both the production of
different body odours and in the perception of and response to body odours."
In other words, we like each
other's smells.
The Swedish study suggests we are even closer in this regard to the animal than previously
thought. It's a bit more complicated than sniffing sweat, but essentially, the Swedes tested 36 heterosexual and
homosexual men and got them to sniff all kinds of common odours, such as lavender, and slipped in two suspected
pheromones derived from testosterone and estrogen.
The testosterone derivative, called AND (what is this
chemical? and more importantly...how do we get some? - ed.), sparked definite biological interest in the women
and gay men; the estrogen derivative activated something called the hypothalamus in heterosexual men.
Previous
animal studies suggest that the hypothalamus plays a major role in sexual behaviour.
There's a complication,
however. Dr. Nick Neave, a biological psychologist at Northumbria University, told a British interviewer that
pheromones play a key role in sexual attraction among animals, which detect them through a nasal organ called the
omeronasal. If we humans have one of those up our noses, nobody has yet been able to find it. (If we *didn't*
have one, why would odours play a role at all? :blink: -ed.)
The studies leaves this to ponder: Does it mean
humans will eventually junk scented deodorants, antiperspirants, after-shave and anything else that masks natural
body odour?"
