Despre miros

La întoarcerea din cantină în cameră am descoperit un iz în spiritul activităţilor specifice sesiunii (o noapte petrecută pe afurisitul ăsta de scaun). Aşa că am decis să mă îndeletnicesc cu activităţi specifice sesiunii (fugitul de muncă) şi am căutat un pic pe net despre mirosul uman - nu cel perceput ci cel generat.
N-am găsit răspunsul la întrebarea "ce ne face să mirosim fiecare altfel şi de ce numai ceilalţi ne simt mirosul?", dar am găsit ceva la fel de interesant. De pe http://www.cf.ac.uk/biosi/staff/jacob/teaching/sensory/olfact1.html (plin de chestii interesante acolo):
Am pus şi inimioara :)

Smell and mate choice

Recent work from Martha McClintock's lab in Chicago shows that women are able to detect minute differences in male immunotype by smell (Jacob et al., 2002). Immunotype is conferred by HLA alleles, the genes that confer immunity in humans (the equivalent of MHC in animals), and determines our individual smell. We tend to prefer smell of people who have different HLA alleles to our own. This would mean the offspring of such a match would confer immune advantage - more different HLA alleles would be passed on to the kids giving them a greater degree of immunity. We tend to be repelled by people whose immunotype (HLA alleles) is similar to our own. It looks like we choose our partner on the basis of smell (Wedekind et al., 1997) - well it would be one factor anyway. So, why do we spend so much time, and money, disguising it? Actually, we can probably detect the HLA-related smell in spite of our best attempts to cover it up!

Interestingly, the Chicago lab found that the women in their study rated human odour in absolute terms as slightly pleasant and more pleasant than common household odours (0.2 on a scale -5 to +5).

Smell and sexual orientation

In a study of smell preferences, heterosexual and homosexual men and women were asked to evaluate underarm sweat from 24 donors. Gay men and women had body odour preferences that were different from straight men and women. Gay men preferred odours from gay men and straight women, whereas odours from gay men were the least preferred by straight men and women and by lesbian women.

The astonishing implication is that body odour is linked, not only to gender, but also to sexual orientation. How? Good question! This work, by Wysocki, Martins, Preti and Crabtree will appear in the September 2005 edition of Psychological Science.

• Sperm may smell their way to the egg. Smell receptor has been identified in human sperm (¹Spehr et al., Science 2003). This receptor functions in sperm chemotaxis and may be a critical component of the fertilization process.

• Women able to detect the "scent of fear" (²Ackerl, Atzmueller and Grammer, 2002). Female subjects wore underarm (axillary) pads while watching a scary movie or a neutral movie. The pads were presented to a panel of women who were able to discriminate between "fear" and "non-fear" axillary pads.

• (Oct 2005) Male mice with a genetic modification that disrupted the function of the olfactory epithelium (lack of cyclic nucleotide gated cation channel CNGA2) failed to show any sexual behaviour towards female mice and did not become aggressive when introduced to foreign males - a situation that normally induces aggressive behaviour.

Imi place ca daca e ceva ce sigur spun toate rezultatele astea, e ca sigur exista dragoste la prima vedere...