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It smells like Heaven… sort of.

I’ve always believed in pheromones, you know; I really have. Ever since I heard about animals using them, I’ve suspected it would have been a mistake if Darwin hadn’t gifted us with them as well. They’re almost magical, don’t you think? An invisible odour, or whatever it is that transmits as much information as words or PBS television programs, could be very useful to us.

I’ve written about smell before[i] of course, but by and large only about those aspects of it that render it noticeable, like summer camp latrines, or partially eaten hamburgers still hiding in the back seat of the car. But there’s so much more to smell than, well, odour -or am I using the wrong word here? I mean, what do you call something wafting through the air that is somehow detectable but which you can’t smell because it has no scent? What use is a nose for that kind of thing, especially if you don’t know which direction to turn to get away from it? Who knows (sorry for the homophone) when we’re receiving instructions, or news programs? That’s why pheromones are so mysterious, eh? Like, when there’s no return address, how can we ever know where they came from -or, for that matter, whether we even got the message?

I can sometimes tell if someone I’m talking to is afraid, or anxious, but I’ve always thought it was conveyed more conventionally through the various senses I’ve spent a lifetime honing. But maybe hunches, are really more than that; maybe something else is going on in the background as well. Take tears, for example; apparently there’s more going on with them than meets the eye, or greets the ear.[ii] Who would have guessed that tears may actually contain pheromones that send us messages in addition to their emotional component? Maybe empathy is made of different stuff than we have hitherto suspected.

I suppose, in a roundabout way, that makes more sense of tears; perhaps there’s more than the visual effect and the engendered guilt or sympathy which is at play. For example, apart from drawing attention to itself for some need or other which it cannot otherwise express, what else might the tears of a baby be conveying? How else could the most helpless member of our society deliver a message to protect itself, as well as satisfy its needs; how else could it dampen down the aggression that its loud, irritable crying might engender? You guessed it: pheromones. Tears don’t always reduce the hearer’s irritation, but I suppose it’s worth a try, eh? Any port in a storm. I mean, it seems to work for naked mole rats: ‘subordinate male naked mole rats will cover themselves in teary secretions to avoid attacks from dominant males, and the tears of female mice contain a chemical that  curtails aggression between male mice.’

Okay, that part was a complete surprise: I’ve never actually heard of a mole rat -naked or otherwise. I can, however, relate to the useful effect of tear pheromones in upset humans. It would seem that a small study (n of only 6 human females who were able to produce enough tears watching sad movies to provide 1 ml of tears to each of a group of angry men) found that those same men in an MRI smelling tears displayed 43.65% less aggression than those smelling saline (and don’t ask about how they could be that accurate). Apparently tears can reduce testosterone levels, which in turn… well, you know the route.

Oh yes, and in case you’ve already put your hand up to ask, they didn’t use tears produced by peeling onions, a task to which I was  routinely assigned in sundry kitchens throughout my all too brief domestic journeys. Although at the time I looked upon it as a punishment, perhaps, in retrospect, it bespoke other concerns; it certainly had a negative effect on my dopamine levels, at any rate. I’d rather not comment on any testosterone stuff, though…

Although I think most of us have always been vaguely alert to the emotional messages such as anxiety or fear that non-exercise sweating can reveal in another person, I suspect that we usually attribute it to reading the person’s ‘body language’ rather than an unsubstantiated hunch. I mean if there are no other detectable signals, we feel a need to explain our suspicion with the modality with which we are most familiar: vision.

Dogs, however, seem to live in a world dominated by smell, so most of us can understand that they likely have an increased awareness of such subtle signals as pheromones -they are dogs, after all. And they (probably) don’t have another sufficiently sophisticated language to convey information in the same way a visual and aural species like our own does. In fact, on reflection, one might wonder if the quality of useful information we receive from smell, is in some way analogous to the gibbered quality of the verbal information a dog gets from us…

In that same vein, if mother can recognize her newborn by something akin to scent that unrelated others seem to miss, are the two of them actually being mutually affected by pheromones? Equally, one has to wonder about what it is that triggers many of the emotions of which we are so proud: the ones that presumably elevate us far above lesser creatures; the ones we are sure are unique to homo sapiens; the ones that signal beyond all doubt that we care. If a dog can sense fear, and perhaps happiness via pheromones [iii] what about our much vaunted feelings of empathy, sympathy, or even love? Could these, too, be related to pheromonal signals from the object of our attention? Not intentionally, perhaps, although any of them could be seen as a protective naked-mole thing, or at least, an attempt at establishing an alliance, a defence.

So, I’m afraid the question has to be asked –sotto voce, of course- whether we are being manipulated into altruism…

Just asking, eh…?

[i] https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2020/03/22/all-the-perfumes-of-arabia-will-not-sweeten-this-little-hand/

[ii] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sniffing-womens-tears-may-reduce-aggression-in-men-study-finds-180983509

[iii] Ibid.

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