LONG POST WARNING!

Like many of you I\'ve read a good deal on Pheromones and the Vomeronasal Organ. Certainly not everything, but then I doubt anyone has. While I have no credentials that entitle me to present hypotheses, I do have this forum where I can do so nonetheless. Much of what I\'m about to present is conjecture, some is based on reading I\'ve done on theories that may have been subsequently proven or even disproven. Some is stolen direcly from you, my fellow forum members. I tender thanks and apologies where applicable.

To begin, I offer a little story which, while NOT related directly to Pheromones, will hopefully illustrate the incredible powers of adaptivity of the human brain.

A pregnant woman has a craving for lox. The dutiful father-to-be finds an all-night deli, and heroically returns home with the object of his wifes desires, and all is well.
On the next routine visit to the obstetrician, insightful Ob/Gyn Doc asks mom-to-be if she\'s had any cravings. She relates the lox saga. The doctor states that he\'ll prescribe a potassium supplement, as that\'s a nutrient often depleted during pregnancy, and the craving for lox was likely the body\'s way of conveying this message. Lox is evidently loaded with potassium.

If you try to figure out what happened here, you cannot help but come away with an incredible degree of respect for the power of the human brain.
First, a message of need was transmitted. From where? A particular organ in the woman\'s body? An organ in the fetus? The brain of the fetus? I don\'t know.
Next that message was received and translated into a practical solution by the brain, and a remedy was \"prescribed\".
The pregnant woman had no clue that lox contained potassium, or that she even needed potassium, but her brain put the signal into terms that became workable. Her brain somehow knew that lox was a familiar means of acquiring the necessary nutrient, and thus created the craving.
If she had been a primitive living in the rainforest, she might have been more likely to send her husband out for bananas, but perhaps in this case the mom\'s brain realized there were no all-night produce stands nearby.

We see a great deal of conflicting information regarding the existence and/or functionality of the human Vomeronasal Organ. I\'m willing to believe that we all have a fully functional VNO, but I also wish to present a theory that would allow for the effectiveness of Pheromones even if our VNO\'s were non-functional.

What if our VNO\'s HAD begun to become mere vestigial organs at some point in our evolutionary past? Wouldn\'t our brains with their incredible powers of adaptability have found some way of creating a back-up system, a redundancy to provide the ability to utilize this feature in some way should it be required at some point in the future?

I would suggest that just the smell of Pheromones will provide the activation of the Hyperthalamus that the VNO is reputed to have an exclusive lock on. That is to say that there\'s a programmed response to Pheromones triggered by our olfactory sense and cross-wired to the hyperthalamus, by-passing the VNO altogether. The programming being NOT a conditioned response but rather an input of information from one piece of biological hardware to another by a means that is different from the original configuration.

They have a motto at the Disney company, \"If you can dream it, you can do it.\" I\'ll propose that our brains work on a similar premise. We cannot begin to imagine the capabilities within our heads. Or maybe we CAN.

I cannot concede that in the process of our allegedly losing the use of our VNO for the purpose for which it was intended, that our brains didn\'t create (or ALREADY have in place) a back-up system.

This could account for the results seen in the experiments where it was supposedly found that Androstenone and Androstenol don\'t activate the VNO. They may only trigger Hyperthalmic response when received by olfactory sensors. So, I\'ll ask the question before truth can, \"So what about the positive effect of Androstadienone on the VNO?\". Maybe that\'s the only embodiement of androgens that our devolved VNO\'s CAN detect. I really don\'t know. I\'d like to, but I don\'t.

DIHL

We all daydream. We\'ve seen people daydreaming. It looks to the observer that the daydreamer is \"somewhere else\" mentally. Perhaps the daydreamer is in some \"place\" deep within the mind.

The state of daydreaming and the effect we call the \"Deer in the Headlights Look\" are probably quite similar, though they likely don\'t occur in the same \"place\".

The Hyperthalamus is a primitive part of our brains that we no longer rely upon to the extent that our early ancestors did. While we know that it still regulates body temperature and other necessary functions, it\'s rarely called upon to make a \"Fight or Flight\"* decision, and the role of Pheromone input has surely diminished over the millenia.
But when it IS called upon, it works damn well.
*I\'ve long wondered, if we were suddenly exposed to the scent of a Sabre-toothed Tiger while we were sleeping, if we\'d suddely bolt upright and go crashing through the nearest window to escape. (Haven\'t lost any sleep over this though.)

When I\'ve been fortunate enough to see what I\'d refer to as a \"Textbook DIHL\", what I\'ve observed is a woman going to another place, somewhere DEEP within herself, totally negating the effect of the conscious mind.

I would liken it to driving on a mountainous country road while listening to the radio. Suddenly, instead of Creed or Bush, you\'re listening to a Bluegrass station, and it doesn\'t go away until you\'ve crested the next hill, unless you can actively tune your own station back in.

That\'s where females who are truly in DIHL mode are, somewhere in the deep primitive recesses of their minds, awaiting a signal to bring them back.
Something like a transmission slipping.

The little Hyperthalamus has taken over control of the ship, and the more developed parts of her brain need to muster their forces to put down the mutiny. How long this takes can give you an idea of how well developed those forces really are.
Sometimes the transmission keeps slipping. [img]images/icons/crazy.gif[/img]

Thank you to those that stayed with me through the ramblings above. I had more to present, but realized that this was already an epic. Perhaps I\'ve only restated the obvious, I don\'t know. Perhaps I\'m SO far off base that it\'s laughable. Again, I don\'t know. I only ask that if you\'d like to argue these points, that you do so in plain English. The only letters after my name are \"Jr\".

Oscar [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]