This morning, this article caught my attention while mindlessly doing some reading (ha): Why Smart People Are Stupid.

While there are a few technically inaccurate—or rather sloppy—assertions (oh snap, girl’s talking trash!), I’ll gloss over them for now. The main point, I gathered, is in this paragraph:

“While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.”

This reminded me of a hilarious, and informative, discussion of Major Histocompatibility Complex and human pheromones from Dirty Mind:

“What is it that we are picking up from another person that forces our attention so strongly upon him or her? That can sexually arouse us after only a look or a word? Make us crave that person’s future company?

After attraction has been established, what is it that determines whether it will grow into love? Does that attraction have to be there immediately, or can it grow over time?

Here’s a case where animal models are not much help. Female rats don’t care if a male rat has a sense of humor or what it does for a living. It doesn’t matter to male rats how many baby daddies a female has previously entertained or whether she has a season pass to Penn State games.

I don’t even know how to begin to qualify what might count as hot on the rat ass scale, but I do know that a show of teeth in these critters usually precedes an attack. Courtship in rodents and human beings is not all that analogous.

For example, the prairie vole, the rodent mascot of love, becomes attracted to another vole after a lot of urine sniffing. The pheromones, small chemosensory compounds, in the urine give these animals enough information to make a connection and get to work getting busy. The same setup is not going to work with humans.”

The author goes on to talk about that famous Sweaty Shirt Study where they found that our sex sweat activates the area that regulates our emotion and social behavior (the right orbitofrontal cortex), and the area that controls our sexual behavior, that glorious, oh so glorious hypothalamus.

“This means our brain is doing a lot with the chemosensory information in the sweat of sexual arousal. Somehow we know that it belongs to another human without being explicitly told so.

Our brain also seems to understand that the scent has something to do with sex. These smells are managing to convey a lot of important information without our even being aware of it.”

There’s something simultaneously romantic and frightening, or at least unsettling, about this discovery. It’s ridiculously brilliant that things work this way, that there can only be so much rationalizing, justifying, and explaining that we can do in this dance. The rest is, like it or not, up to our nose. (Cue cheesy “the nose knows” exasperated exclamation.)

For those of us in the human race insisting that we are completely, a hundred-percently rational beings, making rational decisions based on facts and data and charts and graphs, this is potentially agitating, or at best befuddling. ZOMG WE ARE NOT ALWAYS IN CHARGE OF OUR OWN DECISHUN?

The olfactory system is so powerful that, even if you can’t physically smell something, a memory, or a well-crafted description can almost take you there, a la Tom Robbins in portraying September in Louisiana:

“The air–moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh–felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time.”

What I’m trying to say, really, is today—and many more days of my life, the rest of my life, really—I’m decidedly grateful for my olfaction. I’m grateful that I have no idea how it works, and it still, faithfully, tirelessly, carries on its work, leading me to the right food to eat, reminding me to do laundry and shower before I offend my neighbors, and, and this is important, helping me sniff out the right boy to snog with.

As them Mice would say:

The ocean breathes salty, won’t you carry it in?
In your head, in your mouth, in your soul.
And maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll both grow old.
Well I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I hope so.