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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

What a wonderful article :)

From what I understand, she showed that for mice, gender-specific behavior is triggered mostly by pheromones and their processing in the nose. This is such a strong effect, that knocking out the gene will make male virgin mice behave like female mothers.

I wouldn't be surprised if something similar also exists in humans, because many languages have phrases like "fail the smell test" for an unsympathetic person.

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In American English when something "doesn't pass the sniff test" it means that it is quite obviously bullshit. As in, something that might look nice but obviously smells of shit. Less crudely, you might describe milk that way: spoiled milk looks like good milk but it definitely does not smell like good milk. It doesn't really have anything to do with a person in particular, unless historic usage was different from modern usage.

I don't know about other languages, but I don't think there's any connection in English.

> The signals that a mouse detects are very specific to other mice. Humans and other higher primates do not have this organ for sensing pheromones. However, the areas of the brain controlling essential behaviors are thought to be conserved in evolution in all vertebrates, particularly the parts of the hypothalamus that control feeding, reproduction, mating and parenting. It is therefore very likely that the neuronal populations and associated circuitry that we discovered in mice also exist in some forms in the human brain to regulate parenting behavior.

Humans secrete pheromones, can detect them, and respond to them.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987372/

https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/15/4/579/205993

We use our noses to detect them.

It is a wonderful article.

It certainly seems possible, though mice have an organ for this we do not.

There is an interesting and seemingly not well-understood link between loss of sense of smell and decreased longevity: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/poor-...

Wild speculation, but maybe there is some key circuitry in our brains that also doesn’t activate if we cannot smell?

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