Health

Does Your Nose Help Pick Your Friends?

Humans maintain a polite fiction that we do not always smell each other.Despite the opposition efforts, we all have our own scent, comfortable and not so much, and If we are like other terrestrial mammalsOur particular perfume May mean something to our fellow humans..

Some of these are self-evident, like the smell of a person who hasn’t bathed for a month, or the peculiar whims of a toddler pretending not to just fill a diaper. However, scientists studying the human sense of smell and the sense of smell suspect that molecules floating from our skin may be registered at the level of subconsciousness in the nose and brain of the people around us. I am. Do they have a message that we use to make decisions unnoticed? Do they shape who we are?

surely, A small study published in Science Advances on WednesdayResearchers who investigated a pair of friends whose friendship was “clicked” from the beginning found interesting evidence that each person’s body odor was closer to their friend’s body odor than was accidentally expected. And when researchers brought a pair of strangers into the game together, their body odor predicted whether they felt they had a good connection.

There are many factors that make people friends, such as how, when, and where to meet new people. But perhaps what we’ve noticed is how they sniff.

Scientists studying friendship have found that friends have more in common than strangers — not just things like age and hobbies. Genetics, Brain activity and appearance patterns. Inbal Labreby, a graduate student in Noam Sobel’s lab, an olfactory researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has a particularly rapid friendship of the kind that seems to form in an instant with an element of olfactory sensation. I was interested in whether or not it was. He is picking up similarities in their scents.

She recruited 20 pairs of so-called click friends. They both characterized their friendship in this way. She then passed them through a common regimen in the study of body odor: stop eating foods like onions and garlic that affect body odor for a few days. Dismiss Aftershave and Deodorant. Bath with unscented soap provided by the lab. Then put on a fresh, clean T-shirt provided in the lab, sleep in it to make you feel better and smell, and then give it to a scientist for review.

Ravreby and her colleagues used an electronic nose to assess the volatiles rising from each T-shirt, and 25 other volunteers also assessed odor similarity. They were, in fact, interested in the smell of friends being more similar than the smell of strangers. It may mean that the scent was one of the things they picked up when their relationship began.

“It’s very likely that at least some of them were using perfumes when they met,” Ravreby speculated. “But it didn’t obscure what they had in common.”

However, there are many reasons why friends smell the same, such as eating at the same restaurant or having a similar lifestyle, and determining if the scent or the basis for the relationship came first. Is difficult. To investigate this, researchers invited 132 strangers, all of whom first wore T-shirts and came to the lab to play mirroring games. The pair of subjects stood close to each other and needed to mimic each other’s movements as they moved. They then filled out a questionnaire about whether they felt connected with their partner.

Their odor similarity surprisingly predicted whether both felt a positive connection in 71 percent of the time. The discovery means that smelling like us creates good emotions. It may be one of the things we notice when we meet new people, along with where they grew up, whether they like science fiction or sports, and so on. But Dr. Sobel warns that if this is the case, it is just one of many factors.

Covid’s pandemic has so far reduced further research by Ravreby and his colleagues using this design. Experiments that were close enough for strangers to smell each other were difficult to set up.

But now, the team is considering modifying people’s body odors to see if they have similarly smelled subjects together. If the scent correlates with their behavior, it is more evidence that, like other terrestrial mammals, we may be using our sense of smell to help us make decisions. ..

For them and other researchers, there are many mysteries for studying how our personal scent interacts with our personal life in all of its complexity. A blow of air may say more than you know.

“Given the body odor of a bouquet, it’s at least 6,000 molecules,” said Dr. Sobel. “We already know 6,000, but probably much more.”

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