Health

Does your nose help choose your friends?


Humans maintain the polite fiction that we don’t smell each other very often. Despite our efforts, we all have our own, pleasant and less odorous smells, and if we are like other terrestrial mammals, their particular perfume we can mean something to our fellow human beings.

Some of it, such as the squeak of someone who hasn’t showered in a month, or the distinctive squeak of a toddler pretending they’re not just filling up their diapers, are self-explanatory. But scientists studying the human sense of smell, or your sense of smell, wonder if the molecules that glide through our skin may be registering on some subconscious level in our noses and brains. the people around us or not. Do they carry a message that we use in decisions without realizing it? Maybe they’re even shaping the people we do and don’t enjoy spending time around?

Indeed, in a small study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, researchers investigating pairs of friends whose friendships were “sticky” from the very beginning found interesting evidence that smell each person’s body is closer to their friend’s than coincidentally expected. And when the researchers let pairs of strangers play a game, their body odor predicted whether they felt they had a good relationship.

There are many factors that determine who people become friends with, including how, when, or where we meet someone new. But perhaps one thing we’ve noticed, the researchers suggest, is the way they smell.

Friendship scientists have found that friends have more in common than strangers – not just age and interests, but also genetics, brain activity patterns and appearence. Inbal Ravreby, a PhD student in Noam Sobel’s lab, an olfactory researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is curious if particularly brief friendships, the kind that seem to form instantaneously, can an olfactory bulb – can people recognize similarities in their smells.

She curated 20 so-called click friend pairs, both of which characterize their friendship in this way. Next, she put them on a regimen common in human body odor research: Stop eating foods like onions and garlic, which affect body odor, for a few days. Apply deodorant after shaving. Shower with unscented soap provided by the laboratory. Then, put on a new, clean, lab-supplied T-shirt and sleep in it so it looks good and smells good, before handing it over to the scientists for review.

Ms. Ravreby and her colleagues used an electronic nose to assess the volatiles emitted from each t-shirt, and they also had 25 other volunteers rate the similarity of the odors. They were delighted to find that, indeed, the scents of friends were more alike than those of strangers. That could mean smell was one of the things they chose when their relationship started.

“It’s very likely that at least some of them were wearing perfume when they met,” speculated Ms Ravreby. “But it doesn’t hide their common ground.”

However, there are many reasons why friends smell alike – eating out at the same restaurants, leading similar lifestyles, etc. – making it difficult to say whether the smell or the basis for the relationship is first. To probe this, the researchers had 132 strangers, all wearing t-shirts first, into the lab to play mirroring. Pairs of objects stand close to each other and must mimic the motion of the subject as they move. They then filled out a questionnaire about whether they felt a connection with their partner.

Their smell similarity, notably, predicted whether the two felt a positive connection 71% of the time. That finding implies that sniffing an odor similar to our own produces a good feeling. It can be something we notice when we meet new people, along with things like where they grew up and if they like science fiction or sports. But Dr Sobel cautions that, if this is the case, it is only one factor among many.

The Covid pandemic to date has limited further studies using this design by Ms. Ravreby and colleagues; It is difficult to set up experiments in which strangers come close enough to smell each other.

But now, the team is looking at adjusting people’s body odor to see if the subjects were created to smell alike. If scent correlates with their behaviour, that’s plenty of evidence that, like other terrestrial mammals, we can rely on our sense of smell to help us make decisions.

There are many mysteries for them and other researchers to study about how our personal fragrances, in all their complexity, interact with our personal lives. Each airflow can tell more than you know.

“If you think of bouquets as body odor, it’s at least 6,000 molecules,” says Dr. Sobel. “There are already 6,000 people that we know – probably more.”



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