cover image Love Scents: How Your Natural Pheromones Influence Your Relationships Your Moods Who You Love

Love Scents: How Your Natural Pheromones Influence Your Relationships Your Moods Who You Love

Michelle Kodis. Dutton Books, $23.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94333-4

Pheromones, according to Kodis and her co-authors, seemingly work in concert with the five senses to influence our decisions to love, hate, marry, take a job, bond with a newborn baby, befriend a neighbor or avoid a co-worker. In an informative, intelligent and humorous fashion, journalists Kodis and Houy and cell biologist Moran explain how ""pheromone perception"" fits into the complex workings of our daily interactions. Pheromones are odorless molecules processed in humans through the microscopic vomeronasal organ, or VNO, located inside the nose. Not to be confused with scents, pheromonal messages taken into the VNO travel to the hypothalamus in fractions of a second. They are produced in the body and enter the world by wafting off the skin. Sniffing a man's smelly T-shirt may regulate a woman's menstrual cycle and enhance her fertility, we're told. According to the authors, the physical and emotional effects of pheromones not only explain why John loves Mary but why pigs sniff out truffles, orchids attract wasps and ants know their place in the ant hierarchy. Science doesn't fully understand the effects of these elusive,species-specific chemicals, but since their discovery in the 1960s by biotechnologist David Berliner, who contributes a foreword here, the investigation of pheromones has burgeoned into a technology with possibilities as far-reaching as mood elevation, birth and pest control, and the treatment of prostate cancer, anxiety and obesity. (Oct.)