Just as the animals sniff and communicate, a study by researchers from Rice University claims that humans too, have the power to smell and communicate their sexual interests through their body scent.
Assistant professor of psychology, Denise Chen, from Rice University in Houston involved 19 female volunteers, to study their individual responses to men's sweat produced under normal conditions and when sexually aroused.
The findings of the study, published on Dec. 31 in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that human brain recognizes sweat pheromones and strongly supports chemosensory communication.
The female volunteers were made to sniff four different olfactory stimuli samples, one of which was of the sexual sweat. Their response to the smell was observed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), closely studying the way they interpreted these scents.
Functional MRIdefine tracks parts of a brain being used at a given time, even if the brain activity is subconscious.
Observations revealed that right fusiform region, the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right hypothalamus were known to be occupied in encoding olfactory information. The sweat pheromones were actually conveying socio-emotional feelings through the sweat.
Chen noted, "With the exception of the hypothalamus, neither the orbitofrontal cortex nor the fusiform region is considered to be associated with sexual motivation and behavior."
"Our results imply that the chemosensory information from natural human sexual sweat is encoded more holistically in the brain rather than specifically for its sexual quality," she added.
Emotions used in facial and vocal expressions are interpreted by many unique neural mechanisms and this research throws light on the neural mechanism involved in social chemo-signals.
With the brain processing emotional inputs even subconsciously, it seems sexual intentions of humans are clear and unambiguous than they appear to be-atleast to the womenfolk.
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