Sixth Sense
by Paul Hoffman,
Discover Magazine:
This essay was presented
on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour on Wednesday, June 8, 1994 |
It's
not every day that scientists discover a new organ in our bodies, but that's
what's happened. The organ is called the vomeronasal organ, or VNO
for short, and it's a tiny pit, barely visible to the naked eye, about
half an inch into each nostril. Despite its location in the nose,
the VNO has nothing to do with smell, nor the other familiar senses of
taste, touch, sight, and sound. In other animals, from reptiles to
pigs, this inconspicuous organ is responsible for a sixth sense, the detection
of odorless, airborne chemicals passed unconsciously between animals, chemicals
that signal anger, fear, and sexual arousal. These chemical signals
go by the name of pheromones. And until recently, human beings were
thought not to emit or receive them. In other animals, pheromones
control sexual behavior and other social interactions. A male hamster
shows no interest in mating, for example, unless his VNO detects the come
hither chemical emitted by a female. And a female pig gets instantly
in the mood whenever she gets a whiff of the pheromones in a boar's breath.
Technically speaking, the human VNO was not discovered but rediscovered,
and therein lies a tale. There have been fleeting sightings of the
organ in the past, but they were ignored. In 1703, a Dutch military
surgeon observed the pit in a soldier with a facial wound. And in
the mid 1930's, researchers found the organ in human embryos but decided
it vanished after birth. In the late 1930's, the first pheromone
in animals was discovered, a sexual attractant emitted by the female silkworm
moth. Subsequently, scientists made whole careers studying the pheromones
and probing the VNO's of minnows, ants, honey bees, Syrian golden hamsters,
deer, snakes, and beaver. You'd think that one of these curious researchers
would have peered up our own noses to find our VNO and make the case for
human pheromones but initially no one did. No one wanted to undermine
our sense of free will by finding that our interactions are influenced
by subtle chemical exchanges that we cannot control let alone be aware
of. In the 1960's, David Berliner, an anatomy professor at the University
of Utah, was isolating the chemicals in the more than 400 million skin
cells that each of us shed daily. Whenever he left open a particular
flask of odorless skin cell extract, he noticed that the workers in his
lab, who were ordinarily irritable and contentious, became blissfully cooperative.
Busy with other research, he froze the curious extracts, planning to return
to them another day. Thirty years later, he thawed out the extracts
and noted that they still had the power to bring on bonhomie. Berliner
wondered if he had stumbled on the first known human pheromone. As
fortune had it, a few of Berliner's colleagues had just poked around in
200 human noses and spotted a VNO in every one of them, but they weren't
sure that the VNO was a working organ and not a lifeless relic of the past
like the appendix. Berliner offered up his mysterious flask.
His colleagues exposed dozens of VNO's to Berliner's skin extracts and
observed the VNO nerves fire like the Fourth of July. The case for
human pheromones was closed. Berliner now markets his extracts in
a perfume called "Realm." Scientists now need to find out how many
human pheromones there are and what behaviors they actually influence.
More than any other social animal, human beings are shaped by experience,
so our responses to the pheromones of our fellow men and women surely aren't
etched in stone. Nonetheless, pheromones may help to explain our
first impressions of people, instant dislikes, love at first sight, bad
vibes, or warm fuzzies. I'm Paul Hoffman.
What difference
does it make if women rule, or the rulers are ruled by women? The
result is the same.
— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
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Buck Hunter
Shoots Off His Mouth
Dear Buck
My husband doesn't take me out to dinner
any more? Do you know why not?
— (unsigned)
Dear Mildred
I've told you before, don't bother me at
the office. We'll talk about it at home sometime. |
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