Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: underdog on 27/09/2006 20:18:17
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hey guys,
another topic about phormones and yes I did search the forums and read the other articles..
some people say it has a little effect and some say it doesn't have any effect at all, and some people say it works like magic.
there has been many products about phormone perfumes etc. and it's getting confusing, everyone says different thing.
I do believe it does not work, I mean, it's totally irrational, you just walk by a girl and the next second she's all over you, life would be gewd lol
but what if it do has a >little< effect? what if it works on some people like magic? you can only know that by asking people who tried those products and wouldn't lie about the effect right?
(btw, I recovered from my bipolar disorder :D)
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I've no idea whether these things work, but if you're looking for anything more than a one-off it's probably not a good strategy. If a girl falls for your perfume she's going to be a bit disappointed to find it's not your natural smell.
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Underdog: glad you have come out of your bipolar (although I thought these things are never something that totally goes away, merely that it is brought under control).
Rosy: With regard to the issue of artificial smells as against natural smells, do we not all create artificial surface images of ourselves to create certain impressions upon other people, whether it be the clothing you wear, the perfume a woman wears, or the make-up she wears (OK, I know some men also wear scent and make-up, and not all women do, so the reference to women is a generalisation).
The case of clothing, it is fairly apparent that what is beneath the clothing is different from what the clothing itself is, but nonetheless, the clothing can be used to enhance certain features of the body, to give an impression that the body beneath is different to that which it is. Similarly, make-up can vary from being an obvious work of art, to merely a subtle enhancement of the bodies own colours – and one could argue that a man would be very disappointed if the women looked very must less good without her make-up; yet this typically is only a very rare reaction.
I suspect that humans do, to a greater or lesser extent, respond to pheromones (whether everything marketed as a pheromone is actually that, or if even when it is a pheromone, it has exactly the effect the makers claim – after all, some pheromones could as easily be a repellent as an attractant – simply labelling it a pheromone does not say much; nor is it necessarily certain that every human being will have exactly the same response to a given pheromone). The point is we will use many cues is assessing how we should react to another person, and while pheromones may be one of the factors that we use, so are many others. In the past, an extract from deadly nightshade (belladonna) was used to dilate the pupils of ladies – and dilated pupils are another way a human send subtle signals that they are attracted, and thus attractive, to the opposite sex. I suspect that pheromones may have about as much of an effect (i.e. because it is not obvious, like heavy make-up, it is more difficult for people to compensate for, but the effect is not so overwhelming as to have any guaranteed results).
George
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I don't know... I think it's pretty widely believed that humans do respond to pheromones, I know there was a study a bit ago that investigated what smells men and women found attractive on a used t-shirt, and it turned out that people tended to go for people who were quite like them but not excessively so and to find the smell of people they'd grown up with very unattractive (inbuilt guards against incest?) but that siblings who'd grown up seperately tended to find oneanother's scent very attractive.
The point was, really, that different people find different sets of pheromones attractive
So what I meant above was that a pheromone based perfume might tend to mask the real smell of the individual in some kind of universal attractant (no idea, as I say, whether it really does), which would tend to up their chances of a one-night stand but possibly worsen the odds of finding someone who would want to stay for breakfast..
Smells certainly have a very powerful effect on people.. like issues with flashbacks being triggered by smells- the mother of a friend who was a midwife who did aromatherapy for mothers in labour used to say she had to use very complex mixes of smells lest the woman encountered the same smell again in the future and suffered a flashback. (I guess I could also mention the Proust thing about the madeleines... not that I've read it but it is pretty extensively quoted and seems to be an experience people recognise.)
My feeling, though, is that there's a lot of rather subconcious stuff going on with smell that it's much harder to recognise as different than spotting that someone's had a haircut/shave/isn't wearing the push-up bra..
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quote:
Originally posted by another_someone
Underdog: glad you have come out of your bipolar (although I thought these things are never something that totally goes away, merely that it is brought under control).
George
It was a mixture of many things that caused my bipolar disorder, exams stress, breaking up with gf, losing my will to live, and some other issues all at the same time, lasted for months.
but I got over everything now one by one, and stopped suffering from any bipolar disorder symptoms, that doesn't mean I totally recovered and it won't kick in again though
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i read something similar to rosys last statement... the sweaty t-shirt test showed that people were naturally attracted to a similar phenotype as themselves, but not EXACTLY the same.
my idea from it was that perhaps people are attracted to similar looking people to keep some homogeneity in offspring, but not too similar; because that would mean not enough variance of genes. but that wasnt and hasnt been condluded.
the POINT id like to make though is that in pheromone perfumes- whose pheromones are you getting? everyones is unique, and the signals it sends might be positive, neutral, or negative.
id stay stick to your natural scent, because humans have been propogating for a long, long time and whatever the deal with pheromones is; nature knows best.
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There is no doubt that the T shirt test did relate to personal smells, but that technically is not, as I understand it, the same thing as a pheromone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheromone
quote:
A pheromone is any chemical or set of chemicals produced by a living organism that transmits a message to other members of the same species. There are alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect behavior or physiology. Their use among insects has been particularly well documented, although many vertebrates and plants also communicate using pheromones.
Clearly, the T shirt test does not relate to any of these message signals. The T shorts relate to personal identification, not to generic signalling.
George