“Investigators in the US admit to being stunned by the finding and the implications for the understanding of sexuality.
In a study published yesterday by the British journal Nature, the team engineered female lab mice so that the rodents lacked a gene called TRPC2, effectively short-circuiting the so-called vomeronasal organ.”
Nose leads way for mouse on prowl | The Australian
Well she-it, y’all - that thar beats a hen a-rootin’ on a rock pile now, don’t it?
The last line in study was pretty interesting too…
“The results do not apply directly to humans, as we and other higher primates lack a vomeronasal organ.”
They didn’t say it’s nonfunctional, they are saying it just doesn’t exist!!
During the past few years, the fact that the human VNO doesn’t exist has been accepted by every olfactory researcher I know. However, this fact is never acknowledged by any marketer I know who has claimed or currently claims that their product acts via the human VNO. What would they say: “Sorry, we lied!” I continue to be amazed by the number of products advertised that claim the human VNO does exist. Perhaps someone will talley product search results and see how few products are not being marketed via an outdated concept.
James V. Kohl
http://www.pheromones.com
I always thought after reading your posts and articles that you meant VNO is not required for Pheromonal effect, not that it doesn’t exist, i.e. it is a vestigial organ. Obviously I understood wrong!
Not necessarily wrong, perhaps just underinformed and primarily led to misunderstanding by product marketing with claims that human pheromones act via a non-existent organ. Several years ago researchers discovered that other mammals processed pheromones through the main olfactory system, like the way odors are processed, and that the mammalian VNO was not required for their hormonal and behavioral responses to pheromones. Because my focus has always been on the mammalian response to pheromones (i.e., a change in hormones), I had no vested marketing interest in the human VNO, and claims that it was involved in human behavioral change, which were never proved. I did have a vested interested in comparing the mammalian and human hormonal and behavioral responses to pheromones, which I relatively recently began to more technically refer to, in discussions of humans, as olfactory/pheromonal input.
The technicalities involved in extending a mammalian model to humans are a huge problem when addressing a general audience, or even with addressing academics whose research is not biologically based. Hours spent in discussion shed little light, when most people have been so biased by misleading information that I must either repeatedly defend my position, or drop out of the discussion.
So, I wrote and recently published a comprehensive review that makes many, if not all, the issues more clear to biologically based researchers, in hopes that they will take a stand on these issues. The reveiw won an award, as I mentioned in another thread, which will lead to more focus on the ways human pheromones (i.e., olfactory/pheromonal input) influence human sexual preferences and human behavior.
James V. Kohl
author/creator: The Scent of Eros