31 ms·
Chemical emitted by babies could make men more docile, women more aggressive
- CapitalistCartr 5y agoMy son smelled so wonderful as a baby. Then at about 3-1/2 he started just smelling musky like a boy. I miss that baby smell.
- RappingBoomer 5y agoi have long suspected that babies emit some chemical that changes adults...because people who become parents modify their behavior substantially
- Nasrudith 5y agoThere is no need to emit if they produce it themselves from other stimuli, such as sleep deprivation.
- v77 5y agoWow, a study with a bit of work on mice and a small non-blinded study done on undergraduates at a university? What are the odds of this actually being an actual real effect? <1%?
- nkingsy 5y agoThis passes my person smell test (dad joke)
- rp1 5y agoI don’t know if this counts as a pheromone, but babies definitely emit _something_. As a recent father, I have had numerous people remark on how wonderful babies smell after smelling my child. I can’t smell anything. People who can smell this particular smell seem very perplexed that I can’t smell it.
- Flankk 5y agoHey Bobby, does this kid smell strange to you?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- amelius 5y ago> As a recent father, I have had numerous people remark on how wonderful babies smell after smelling my child. Did you get these remarks from women, and were they aggressive (as the study says)?
- jtbayly 5y ago“Your baby smells so good!… … NO! I will not give her back now!”
- wruza 5y agoDo they have kids themselves by any chance? My theory is that it “turns on” once you become a parent, because almost every non-family male I knew at the time of my “research” found baby smell from repulsive to disgusting, while their mothers couldn’t get enough of it. Similar effect in how they look for different people.
- cambaceres 5y agoI have the same experience. The smell dissapears when they stop breastfeeding.
- slothtrop 5y agoI had developed a minor obsession with home security and we quipped that it must be the pheromones.
- UI_at_80x24 5y agoMy wife can smell it, but I can't.
- 5y ago
- dopa42365 5y agoAlso found in rotten horse meat and insect cadavers and that's enough scrolling pubmed for me today. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34653803/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34653803/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34738202/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34738202/
- koheripbal 5y agoI don't know if this is the same chemical that is released by decaying humans, but the few times I was exposed to decaying human bodies (forgotten elderly people in apartment complexes), I felt an overwhelming calming feeling. The smell is overwhelming, but I specifically remember the feeling it created.
- serverlessmom 5y agoThis is a very interesting effect. If it is the same chemical, I wonder if it's because the scent sends signals to your brain that indicate that you might be in danger and keeping your cool may be somehow beneficial to your survival...
- sslayer 5y agohmm, could this be exploited for test taking
- ackbar03 5y agoOr an interview. Although your interviewers might not be too impressed
- willcipriano 5y agoWeekday with Bernie
- kingcharles 5y agoI brought Grandma along, she wanted to watch. Yes, she's fine, she's just sleeping. Please don't mention the scent, she's sensitive about it.
- jessaustin 5y agoCould this or some other chemical play a role in postpartum depression?
- joshxyz 5y agoIs that why me mum slap my hands when teaching me abc's, eh?
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoI would be careful in ascribing too much to this. It hadn’t established babies actually produce enough of the chemical to affect behavior.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoBabies are funny, my 7 month old is only making noises while breathing in. I wish more of our language had breathing-in based sounds, it could double our information transfer rate!
- elwell 5y agoNot to mention, if we all would talk with inward breaths then covid might spread slower.
- abrowne 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implosive_consonant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implosive_consonant
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThanks for posting this, “ They are now transcribed ⟨ɓ̥ ɗ̥ ᶑ̥ ʄ̊ ɠ̊ ʛ̥⟩ or occasionally ⟨pʼ↓ tʼ↓ ʈʼ↓ cʼ↓ kʼ↓⟩. “ I now have ASCII characters to quote my son!
- jasonhansel 5y agoAlso: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingressive_sound https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingressive_sound
- jb_s 5y agoLanguages are hard enough without that! I wonder if anyone has ever tried to make a "nightmare" language that is as hard to learn as possible. Thinking like.. 13 tones, pops, clicks, whistles, every possible grammatical structure from other languages at once... etc
- somesortofthing 5y agoIt's technically optimized for information density rather than pure frustration but it sounds like Ithkuil is what you're looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil?wprov=sfla1
- pezzana 5y ago> A new study could change that. Researchers have identified an odorless compound emitted by people—and in particular babies—called hexadecanal, or HEX, that appears to foster aggressive behavior in women and blunt it in men. Hexadecanal is a sixteen-carbon chain aldehyde: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecanal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecanal A few years back a team claimed to have isolated essence of old person, 2-nonenal, a chemically-related nine-carbon unsaturated aldehyde: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Nonenal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Nonenal https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(15)41198-4/fulltext https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(15)41198-4/full... The occurrence of pheromones in the animal kingdom, but so far scant evidence in humans, is a puzzle: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-human-pheromones-real/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-human-pheromo... Maybe there really are no human pheromones. Or maybe they're just really hard to study because studying human behavior is so hard in general.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- FooBarBizBazz 5y agoHexadecanal appears to be an approved food additive that you can buy in bulk?
- omgitsabird 5y agoMaybe because it is in a lot of foods naturally? https://foodb.ca/compounds/FDB003048#associated_foods https://foodb.ca/compounds/FDB003048#associated_foods Supposedly, it tastes like cardboard.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago> Maybe there really are no human pheromones. There are human pheromones, but the church has taught its followers to clean themselves for hundreds of years, just by observing behaviour. Today we have science which can explain behaviour and different chemicals do affect behaviour. Just takes loads of histidine and see how snappy and aggressive you get, or take loads of glycine and see how you laugh your head off in stressful (cortisol high) situations. I've wondered for some time why vitamin RDA's are set at the levels they are considering the world is a more polluted and stressful place. My conclusion so far is the current vitamin RDA's will not give you rude health and I think there is some behinds the scenes military involvement or troops used as unwitting guinea pigs to help govt's decide what vitamin RDA levels should be. Its very hard to get healthy food today despite all the technology, a lot has changed since the 70's.
- RyJones 5y agoUsed to be a new father; can confirm. Women who would not pay attention to me without a baby would stop me on the street to coo over a babe in arms.
- gnicholas 5y agoThere are many plausible reasons why women would approach a man with a baby that have nothing to do with how babies smell. For example, some women just like looking at babies. They may be reminded of their own babies, or thinking of babies that they'd like to have someday. Also, women may be more likely to talk to a man who seems non-threatening (men with babies are probably responsible for very little violent crime!). While it is possible that babies smell a certain way, and even a whiff of that scent makes women more aggressive, I'd be surprised if this were the most relevant pathway for 'why women are more likely to approach a man with a baby than a man without a baby'. The main variable is the presence of the baby, not how the baby smells. Now if you tell me that women were more likely to approach you when you had recently been holding a baby...then I think we can draw up articles of incorporation and start a new cologne company.
- Railsify 5y agoI would guess they decided to approach you before they smelled the baby. How close do you have to be to smell a baby. If they were close enough to smell I suspect the had already approached you by the strictest definition of approach.
- vmception 5y agoAny cisgender women that like to check out babies want to chime in? Maybe additional ciswomen that talk with their other cis women friends who like to check out babies?
- tsimionescu 5y agoWhy bring up cis women specifically? If this response/behavior is in fact real (which I have many doubts on), you could well theorize that it is related to female hormones, which transwomen who have transitioned have as well.
- joelbondurant 5y agoIt has to be mandatory or no one will comply.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoIt kinda makes sense.... after birth a woman could be recouping and 'vulnerable', in cavemen days, so maybe the pheremones are to make men who might have nefarious notions back off, and women stand up like a bear on all fours when someone tries to be shitty to them, but to also protect their baby. Probably has a role w/ post-partum depression too, I'd imagine.
- voldacar 5y ago>We cannot say that this is a pheromone,” says study author Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. “But we can say that it’s a molecule expressed by the human body that influences human behavior, specifically aggressive behavior, in a predicted manner.” so... a pheromone?
- bawolff 5y agoI think the distinction is - is enough of it excreted that it can be transfered between people (or babies and people) or it just something that is made internally and just affects yourself,in which case it wouldn't be a pheromone.
- aardvarkr 5y agoChemically it could be something entirely different that could lead to some really cool new discoveries
- voldacar 5y agoWell afaik a pheromone is defined by its function, not its molecular structure.
- ccalloway 5y agoA pheromone has a specific purpose of affecting the behavior of other humans. The scent of various bodily emissions, eg urine, would seem to meet the above criteria, but they are not usually considered pheromones.
- nstart 5y agoThis was a great article in that it was a decent example of how pop-science articles could be written. - the claim made focuses only on the results of the chemical itself - the explanations adequately state the limitations of the results themselves - the follow up comments from in field individuals clearly states the relationship (or lack of it) to the study - the article notes quite strongly that while babies emit the chemical, it’s unknown if the amounts emitted are enough to alter behavior.
- musicpulpite 5y agoHubermann mentioned this phenomenon in his podcast (I believe this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJXKhu5UZwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJXKhu5UZwk) back in April
- bjourne 5y agoCould we synthesize this chemical and feed it to rapists?
- jtbayly 5y agoWe already have chemical castration worked out.
- kumarvvr 5y agoThere is something magical about being a father. I remember a scene in the sitcom Friends, where Chandler mumbles cute words after seeing emma. I feel exactly the same whenever I see my son. And he is 5 years old now. So grown up and all. HN successfully attenuated the magic, by floating out these articles which reduce the magic to chemical factors. PS - On a lighter note.
- sublatio 5y agoThe loss of magic is real. Though one thing I've found helpful to understand this phenomenon what is called in some circles "quadrant absolutism." That is, reality can be understood from four perspectives, or quadrants: 1st person singular "I"; 1st person plural "we" or 2nd person "you"; 3rd person singular "it"; and 3rd person singular "its". Quadrant absolutism is taking one or two of these perspectives as more real or true than others. Examples: A religious fundamentalist takes more real or true what his/her community or scripture (1st person plural) believes about reality, leaving out the 3rd person perspectives that would demonstrate, say evolution. Or scientific materialists who only take as ultimately real the "things out there" - chemicals, atoms, quarks, etc, considering 1st person experiences such as love to be somehow less real.
- seba_dos1 5y ago"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" ― Douglas Adams I never understood how explaining something makes its "magic" go away. If anything, it usually made me appreciate it more.
- kumarvvr 5y agoI guess its human nature.
- myself248 5y agoI'm the same way. Going to Disney, I feel deeply unnerved by all the "magic" happening behind the scenes, where forces unknown to me are observing by behavior and sculpting parts of the experience to meet me when I arrive somewhere. It's like being hunted by a bizarre and inscrutable predator. But if I'm aware of the exquisite engineering, and understand how my behavior shapes the experience, then I'm pleased rather than startled when the host at the restaurant greets me by name even though I haven't introduced myself. I can enjoy the care and effort they're putting in, and the vast scope and scale is all the more impressive for understanding it. It starts to feel magical after all.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]