Train to the Brain

By Luke Jackson

"Every person smells slightly different; we all have a personal 'odor print' as distinctive as our voice, our hands, our intellect," writes Helen Fisher, Ph.D., an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, in her book, Anatomy of Love. "As newborn infants we can recognize our mother by her smell, and as we grow up, we come to detect over ten thousand different odors. So if nature be our guide, we are probably susceptible to odor lures."

Does that mean a special someone can lead us around by our noses? In a word: yes. "When you meet someone new whom you find attractive, you'll probably like the 'smell' of him, and this helps predispose you to romance," writes Dr. Fisher. "Then, once infatuation flowers, the scent of your sweetheart becomes an aphrodisiac, a continuing stimulant to the love affair."

There's an anatomical reason why that would be so. When an aroma wafts your way, it gets picked up by some of the thousand-or-so odor receptors that are lumped together in a small patch of tissue in your nasal cavity, right behind the bridge of your nose. Via an elegantly versatile nerve network that scientists have teased apart in just the last few years, we know that these receptors feed their findings to your olfactory bulbs, which process the raw data and send it on to various portions of your brain. One of those places is the limbic system, a primitive region developed early in our evolutionary past that controls emotions and sex drive. Among the five senses, smell is unique, because it has a nonstop flight to this region. (The limbic system is also the seat of long-term memory, which is why you can remember odors years later, while sights and sounds fade after a few days or weeks.)

"Anatomically, smell and the emotions overlap in the brain," says Susan S. Schiffman, Ph.D., professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. "So if you smell something nice, it's going to make you feel better."

Dr. Schiffman's research interest is nonhormonal ways to improve patients' moods. In pursuit of this interest, she's discovered that food odors can boost the immune systems of the elderly. But more to our point here, she studied the effect of perfumes on 56 women in midlife (ages 45 to 60). She found that nice smells did indeed make them feel better. Then she tested 60 men between the ages of 40 and 55. For 12 days these men doused themselves with either a cologne or placebo, and rated their moods twice daily in diaries. Result: Colognes improved men's moods, too. Not wildly- overall, the moods were boosted by a point or two on one-to-ten scales that attempted to measure such factors as tension, anxiety, dejection, anger, fatigue and confusion. If these all-male fragrances didn't give middle-age men the power to seduce young models, at least the scents gave them a lift.

You should know that Dr. Schiffman's research was funded by the fragrance industry. (Men now spend $1.5 billion on colognes every year.) But that does not make it mere propaganda. If colognes can make you feel calmer, more confident and therefore sexier, well, that's money well-spent. You can make that decision for yourself.

But what about the opposite sex? Does our odor print have any measurable effect? Although Dr. Schiffman hasn't researched that avenue yet, she does offer an interesting anecdotal observation. She counsels couples, and she says many differences can be overcome-except odor. If one person dislikes the other's smell, they've got trouble: "There's no amount of counseling you can do to make that go away." In one longtime marriage the husband disliked the wife's smell, so Dr. Schiffman counseled the wife to wear fragrance. (She refused, saying perfumes were unnatural.) Fragrances do not so much mask your odor print as meld with it. "What you come out with is a new odor," she says. She believes fragrances are useful in smoothing your interactions, both at work and at play. "It probably makes initial encounters more neutral," she says.

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