You smell like you'd like to be alone.

This endearing tidbit came from a guest last night at the shelter. The conversation had turned to the warm weather and then progressed quickly downward into a diatribe about the necessities of bathing. It not only made me laugh for a solid minute and a half but also got me thinking about those odorous chemical cues.

Our sense of smell is our oldest sense. It's how we interact with our environment chemically. (We do to a certain extent with taste but you smell most of what you perceive as taste anyway.) I think it's fun to imagine a bunch of single celled amoeba like critters swimming in the primordial ooze sensing their environment through chemical signals.

Hey there. Yeah you, across the ooze. How you doin?

Are you going to ingest that proteinaceous goo to your left?

I am a molecular biologist after all.

A quick google search for pheromones lead me to the HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) website here: Sniffing Out Social and Sexual Signals. It speaks of an even older structure: vomeronasal organs (VNOs) where these chemical signals are first received. The article goes on to discuss various evidence for the presence of these organs in humans.

The third entry in the article is all about pheromones. We know pheromones exist in bugs (because they're generally more effective at life than we are anyways) but their prevalence in human biology has not been so clearly elucidated.

They do this interesting experiment with hamsters where a single male hamster is anesthetized in a cage and they introduce another male hamster. Nothing of interest happens. Re-cue anesthetized hamster. Add vaginal secretions from a hip female hamster and things start to get zany. Cue second male hamster again and now mating occurs (along with all those uncomfortable chats with the hamster parents about 'labels' and 'experimentation.') This leads researchers to believe that the non-anesthetized male hamster must smell something that leads him to believe that the anesthetized hamster is receptive for mating.

Isn't this what happens at Burke St Pub every Friday night? Right about the time when "Pour Some Sugar On Me" gets played for the 9 millionth time? I personally think that a serious amount of research dollars should be invested in figuring out why tequila induces production of said pheromones.

So I guess my real question here is this: Can you really project your current stasis outward in your chemical cues? Can you really smell like you want be alone?

Or what about other emotions? Can you smell happy? Sad? Angry? Bitter? It would be interesting to see the correlation between the "mob mentality" and the chemical cues there.

Think about that the next time someone says "You smell funny."