Advanced Topics in the Use, Testing, and Combination of Pheromones

Field Reports & Anecdotal Experience Men's Pheromone Advice & Field Reports
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Accurate Reporting and Observer Effects

One of the major issues in determining the actual effects of any pheromone application is the fact that your behavior is altered just by being studied. This occurs in a number of different ways.

The first is through a psychosocial phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect. The effect gets its name from the Hawthorne Works factory outside of Chicago, in which researchers attempted to study the effects of various lighting conditions on worker productivity. At first, the researchers were very impressed by the improvements they were able to achieve by increasing the lighting in the factory. However, enthusiasm soon gave way to confusion as they discovered that lower light also increased productivity! They eventually concluded that people change their behavior in response to being studied.

This phenomenon also reliably affects situations in which individuals are studying their own behaviors. For example, studies have shown that would-be dieters who begin recording their food intake in a journal spontaneously reduce their caloric intake and lose weight, even when instructed to make no changes.

Another problem in the observation of pheromone effects is that you have to adopt a level of attentiveness that is unusual for most people, and therefore presents itself as a confounding variable. For example, if you’re looking for increased eye contact, you will yourself have to be making more eye contact than normal, otherwise you’d never notice.

Natural Pheromone Production and Interaction

Many people talk about testing pheromones “solo”, washing their application points well in order to prevent buildup, taking days off from pheromone supplementation, etc. Regardless, most pheromone users still report that a given mix will work excellently one day and not at all the next. Furthermore, many pheromone users have reported “next-day effects” in which certain pheromones seem to produce better effects the day after use than upon initial application. Some have even noted the sudden appearance of pheromone effects after showering.

Some of these problems are likely related to the absorption of pheromones into the skin and their subsequent re-release. However, I hypothesize that more complex biological processes may also play a role in these effects.

  • Hormonal stimulation effects: It could be that prolonged exposure to certain pheromones affect the hormonal activity which precipitates pheromone production.
  • Neuropsychological rebound effects: Likewise, prolonged exposure to pheromones could bring about biological habituation. Removal of the stimulus would activate a re-balancing effect which could in itself affect behavior, in ways either pleasant or unpleasant.
  • Effects on surface metabolism: It appears that the production of odorous steroid compounds is accomplished almost exclusively by bacteria on the skin - Microbial pathways leading to steroidal malodour in the axilla.. Adding foreign compounds could alter the metabolic processes by which these bacteria produce the natural pheromone signature.

The fact is that there is no such thing as a clean pheromonal slate. There is a natural balance of pheromones present on the skin of a healthy adult which provides information about that individual’s physiological status. Any pheromones that we wear are being added onto that natural pheromone state.

I hear someone thinking that the solution is to wash extra well with antibacterial soap. But I don’t think that is a viable solution. Because the natural signature that normally underlies an application of pheromone products is the expected signal. The pheromone product modifies that natural signature. So if you were able to achieve a truly clean slate (which I doubt you could), you would actually be presenting people with an abnormal pheromone signature that would be out of sync with the reports on which the products’ development has been based. You see the dilemma?

So what is the normal, natural pheromone signature like? I don’t think it has been studied as well as we need it to be in order to fully understand how people are responding to natural variances in pheromone production. But we do have some information, which I’ve discussed in my journal:

Changes in Pheromone Response Over the Life Span

Many have noted that higher levels of androstenone seems to be better tolerated when worn by older men. However, I find the usual explanation that younger men are already producing high levels of androstenone to be unsatisfactory. The numbers above indicate that the an average 18-45 male is putting out about 12mcg of androstenone per day, and that’s on the high end. That’s less androstenone than you can get from one spray of IJ. The upper end of natural androstenone production at any given time is just 0.4mcg, which is about 1/6th the content of a single spray of TUTH.

So why is androstenone better tolerated on older men?

One thing that is known is that the balance of odor-producing bacteria on the skin changes with age - Microbial flora and odor of the healthy human ski… [Hautarzt. 1988] - PubMed result. So it could be that older men are naturally producing more buffering pheromones than younger men.

I suspect there are also psychological differences that lend older men an enhanced ability to, as Radman would say, wear that shit. This could be something along the lines of congruence, but I suspect there may also be more to the story…

Pheromones and Field Effects

If you’re not familiar with biological field effects, do yourself a tremendous favor and spend the next hour watching these videos of Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake explaining how different body parts take shape using the identical DNA, how birds & fish maintain formation, and why your pets know when to wait for you by the door:

Many pheromone users, myself included, have noticed a very strange thing that happens when wearing pheromones: some of the best hits occur in situations in which the subject could not possibly have inhaled the chemicals that you’re wearing. For example, through windows.

Could it be that these molecules provide clues not only to the way that people process each other through olfaction, but to the ways that we generate and interpret our personal bioinformatic or morphogenetic fields? Are pheromones changing our auras??

Ongoing Discovery

I hope that this thread can become an ongoing discussion of the further-out possibilities and potentials of pheromone use, as well as the many limiting factors in our ability to study and understand them.

Pheromones...an honest discussion
Confused as to the range of the moons + details of my 1st mone experience!
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Amazing read. About the pheromone aura, I think that when we are using pheromones we become more aware of our surroundings looking for reactions/hits, so maybe it’s the Hawthorne effect?

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One of the most amazing posts I have read in a long time. Like my favourite soccer commentator would say, “SIMPLY BRILLIANT !” :smiley:

I experienced many hits in which there is no possible way the subject could have inhaled any of the chemicals that i had put on. When i was in the bus, the bus went through 3 bus stops in a row and each had either a girl or a guy staring at me until i was out of their site. I was sitting in the bus, windows closed and they were outside waiting for their bus. It happend frequently afterwords that i stopped paying attention as much. It never happend as frequent before, or without mones.

More so, while I’m driving, windows closed, people tend to try to make eye contact with me. It feels like something is telling them to look my way. I don’t know how to explain it anymore then that but I always kept saying and asking that if pheromones is more then just a signal which needs to be inhaled first. I always get a different answer theoretically that doesn’t support what i observed but I tend to believe what I see more then what I hear so I’m not really convinced by the answers but I just let it go.

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Brilliant post!
It was interesting to see what natural pheromone levels might be like. Lots of A1, it looks like, which is interesting.

And that’s weird, the whole “aura” thing. Now that I think about it, I have had little experiences like this. I walk into a large crowded room (like a school cafeteria for example) and almost half the place is eyes-on, and I haven’t even been there for ten seconds yet! This happens a lot, actually, in most environments.

Hmm… We’re always learning something new about this, aren’t we? :slight_smile:

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WOW. Just nominated this post .

This whole idea is totally transformative . It explains the bits that we couldnt really think of, hits that dont have the time to reach effective level.

I cannot emphasize more .

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Well damn Dbot I thought those through the glass hits where because I looked hot that day and had nothing to do with mones. What a bummer. J/K :smiley:

I feel our auric emitations are very much a part of pheromones. Pheromones evoke emotions and your emotions are part of your personality which governs your aura and body language. Makes perfect sense to me although some people get a little freaked out when you start talking about Aura’s.

I feel pheromones primary function is signaling but the effects of that signaling in causing attraction branch out to how it makes us feel, what we project and other areas. Some people confuse this with the placebo effect because its not always the mones directly that are causing the attraction or reactions but how the mones effect as you stated…
“our personal bioinformatic or morphogenetic fields”.

Of course not we all emit them all the time. When we mention a clan slate in here its more about removing the unnatural sprayed on stuff not the natural mones you emit. The mention of anti-bacterial soap is not to remove pheromones or provide a clean slate. Its to help control the bad unattractive body odors that bacteria combined with pheromones can sometimes produce. It’s not suggested that it will improve the effect of the pheromones.

Off topic a little… I know this is the concept of why people journal food intake but what does it mean when you record your food intake and it does the opposite ? It makes you eat more then usual. When I have dieted in the past I could never use this method. I would end up eating more LOL I’m I weird or what ?

Anywhooo… This post is like a gift that needs to be unwrapped. Its exciting and fabulous. Thank you for sharing your insights. I will be busy delving into all this information for weeks.

Tisha

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Our society’s structure, technology, and language conspire to position us as individual beings operating in a separate and unitary fashion. In fact, each human organism is a tremendous collection of smaller organisms functioning in unison; each human organism is also a component in a larger social organism to whom we relate much in the same way that an organ relates to the body. My point is that the outputs of our own body are also inputs. Life is recursive, is a feedback loop.

Ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna did a good job of explaining what I mean:

Most people think about pheromones as drugs, and they do exhibit certain druglike effects. But I think they are not really drugs for us – they are like drugs for the larger social organism that we are a part of. So we experience their true effects in a way that is indirect. It’s like asking the hippocampus what the effects of LSD are. It would only be able to tell you part of the story.

Professional opinion? Sounds like sticking it to the man :wink:

Try instead keeping a journal of all the things you wanted to eat, but decided not to.

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Very instructive !

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This brings me to a lot of questions??? I love when I have new things to ponder…INSIGHTFUL post dbot :smiley:

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Pheromones as a Social Learning Accelerant

Pretty much anyone who has ever involved themselves in personal development has encountered a nagging problem: no matter how different you feel on your own, being around people who know the “old you” still reliably pushes you back into your old patterns of perception and behavior. People treat you in ways that presuppose responses which are congruent with the persona you have shown them.

In many cases, it is not even necessary to be around people you have known before. Simply engaging in a social situation triggers you to enact your own most familiar and automatic patterns of responding. It’s what Robert Cialdini calls a “click, whirr” response, and what NLP describes as a set of unconscious anchors.

Pheromones have the potential to alter this type of conditioned social responding through two pathways:

  • Self-effects: Provided that the signals are not too foreign to be incorporated, the changes in one’s own chemistry can produce feelings and action tendencies that are congruent with the type of person who would have produced the artificial chemical signature. This makes it easier to act in new ways, and so to dehabituate the ingrained patterns of responding.

  • Other-effects: By altering the perceptions and expectations of those around us, pheromones produce a situation in which congruent behavioral patterns are reinforced by the people around us. We are all profoundly influenced by the ongoing social feedback we receive from the people around us, and changing the nature of that feedback again makes it possible to have new social experiences of a type congruent with the pheromone signature being worn.

Combined, these experiences may be able to effectively “break the spell” of personality, allowing you to experience the persona you have maintained up to the present as merely one set of possibilities, chosen largely at random out of the nearly limitless potential of your unique genetic configuration.

The question, then, speaks to recent conversations on the forum about enhancing your strengths versus compensating for your weaknesses. Which pheromone combinations will offer you the best chance to enhance your social experience in ways that support a tendency to grow into a better and more flexible person?

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Tacitus on the intra- and inter-personal effects of pheromones over time:

MHarris on cultivating congruency, using pheromones as a tool for permanent personal growth and change: