Anatomy Shared Article Research

This blog exists for the Anatomy students at Tree of Life Christian School. We will be reading various scientific articles, summarizing our research, and then commenting on others' summaries. We hope to broaden our view of the current research surrounding the human body, and to help others see how truly amazing the design of the human body is.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

a link between smell and gender identity??

Conventional wisdom about the sexes—and most movies marketed to men under 24—work from the premise that men’s and women’s brains are just fundamentally different. The medical spin on this has been that testosterone, in addition to providing extra oomph for muscles, is a key component in the wiring of the male brain. The male brain is first exposed to testosterone in utero, changing basic brain biology and imposing masculinity. Then during puberty, another wash of testosterone results in distinctly male thoughts—the fodder for all that guns-girls-and-parties cinema—in the previously testosterone-primed brain. Deprive the brain of testosterone at either time and you risk perturbing the sublime development of maleness.
Well, it turns out that life may not be quite that simple—at least for mice. A
new study in Nature suggests that the brain pathways for male sexual behavior are also present in female mice, and with those pathways comes the potential for male behavior. Even more intriguing is that the activation of these pathways appears to be regulated by the animal’s sense of smell. Mice, like many other animals, use chemicals known as pheromones to transmit sexual signals, among others. Investigators have recently found that disabling the part of the nose that receives these signals—the vomeronasal organ (VNO)—produces some pretty strange effects on the way a mouse acts out its sex.
Males without a functioning VNO appear to have trouble distinguishing between male and female. They will try to mate with either one and won’t fight other males. This is certainly strange, but our existing model can live with it. Maybe some pheromone turns on those testosterone-sculpted parts of the male brain. No pheromone, no male behavior.

But when female mice don’t have a functioning VNO, even stranger things begin to happen. Like their male counterparts, these mice will try to mount both male and female mice and they engage in the peculiarly male (and particularly attractive) behaviors of butt sniffing and pelvic thrusting. These female mice will also mate in the more traditional way. However, their maternal instincts are altered: they spend less time with their pups and are less aggressive in defending their nests.
What does this mean for us? Well, human mating is a bit more complicated than it is for mice, and our perfumes have far less power over our brains (whatever the beliefs of pushy department-store perfumers). But it may hint that biological gender differences are a bit less hardwired and more flexible than the conventional wisdom suggests. For now, let’s just
inhale deeply and say that these studies raise important questions about how far apart Mars and Venus truly are. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/sep/girls-gone-boys-gone-wild

My opinion:This article caught my eye because i've always been interested in the link between smells and attractions, and about how the brain works. It's a pretty weird phenomenon. It'd be cool to run the same tests on humans just to see if it has the same effect. All in all it was interesting, but i tend to disagree that smell has to do with gender identity. Although i do agree that smell is a large part of attraction,I dont think there is enough evidence here to come to that conclusion. If the tests were ran on humans and had the same outcome that may be a huge step to finding out how the brains in males and females are different. But for now i think we should just accept that we are different i mean if we needed to know God would've told us and for now just knowing that we are different is sufficcient. Maybe mice are just weird. I definatly would like to see more research on this though; it'd be kinda neat!

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This article definately caught my eye. It was very interesting how if the ability to smell a certain scent is taken away then the mouse was unable to identify between male and female. And also that is began to perform the sexual acts of their counterpart, or lose some maternal instincts. However, I find it hard to believe that this study could be true for humans, yet I am so scientist. Overall, it was a great and interesting read!

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 5:51:00 PM  
Blogger Señor Awesome said...

I find this article rather funny, but at the same time quite interesting. Many things that take place within the human body are controlled by certain reactions happening at the right place at the right time, or by a certain chemical being present. I did not think, however, that gender identity could possibly rely upon scent. I too would like to see what happens in humans, but I doubt any parents would give up their kids for this study...

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 8:21:00 PM  
Blogger JoJoForever said...

...This is Kyle Brechbuhler speaking...First, I found this article interesting because it is a topic that seems simple enough that I can understand it, yet it brings about an interesting issue. Smell has always been something that affects our attraction, and usually women and men carry there own scent, but the fact that it can affect our gender identity is something I want to know! It would be cool if they could do a study on this involving humans! That might not be very holy though...

Thursday, October 18, 2007 2:31:00 PM  
Blogger bigbenrocksmyworld said...

I think that in some ways humans differ from animals in that instead of enjoying to the natural smells that we give off we cover them up with more attractive smells. Although it is interesting that the mice had difference of opinions when there VNO was cut off. I think it would be interesting to find out where the human VNO is and compare two humans together. The two being a gay person and a straight person and seeing if one is impaired and thats why the seem to feel this way. And also if it could be fixed.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 4:15:00 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home