Laura said:
One psychopath interviewed by Hare's team said quite frankly: "The first thing I do is I size you up. I look for an angle, an edge, figure out what you need and give it to you. Then it's pay-back time, with interest. I tighten the screws." Another psychopath admitted that he never targeted attractive women - he was only interested in those who were insecure and lonely. He claimed he could smell a needy person "the way a pig smells truffles."
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=11809.msg84633#msg84633
I've been giving this some thought over the last few months as I found the idea interesting. In doing searches for psychopathy and smell, I didn't find much and so kept searching along the lines of lizards and their olfactory senses. Eventually, I came across information relating to the vomeronasal organ (VNS) (also known as Jacobson's Organ and was arguably first reported in humans by Frederik Ruysch in 1703 and rediscovered and named after Ludwig Jacobson in 1813).
I found that while the scientific community in general does admit to humans having it, there seemed to be a disagreement if not in some cases, complete denial of whether or not it has been rendered dormant. Knowing what I currently know about the corruption of science, I thought if there could be any possibility of information that might lead us to better understanding of VNS as it relates to psychopaths, great measures would be taken to hide this knowledge.
I learned of a book titled
Jacobson's Organ by Lyall Watson. In it, he attempts to bring forth new evidence describing the organ's ability as a "'sixth sense' feeding the area of the brain that affects our awareness, emotional states and sexual behavior".
My thoughts in general are that if all humans have this organ (and the research cited in this book confirms that), this would include psychopaths. If psychopaths have it, does it function in the same way that it would in normal humans? Would they even be unaware of its effects as we seem to be?
"Jacobson's Organ rescues our most underrated sense from obscurity. But it is not simply a supercharger, making us more sensitive to odours. What it seems to do is to open up a channel quite separate from the main olfactory system. It feeds an older, more primal area of the brain, one that monitors airborne hormones and a host of other undercover patterns of information, making physiological changes that have profound effects on our awareness, on our emotional states and on our most basic behaviours. Recent research suggests that this system could even be the mechanism for operating a true 'sixth sense', one that may account for our sometimes apparently supernatural ability to receive information not normally available to the traditional five faculties."1
The part in bold struck me as a possible reason for why it sometimes seems that psychopaths are almost psychic at times - picking up on things that are unknown to us - I'm thinking here primarily of pheromones although other chemicals may apply.
In doing a search on olfaction and hormones, I came across information regarding androstenone, a steroid found in both male and female sweat and urine. The smell has been reported to be an unpleasant, sweaty, urinous smell or a pleasant floral smell, depending upon the individual. Those with the RT/RT genotype reported the smell as unpleasant. Those with the Rt/WM genotype either reported no smell or a pleasant odor.
It's possible relation to the vomeronasal organ:
"In humans, androstenone also has been suggested to be a pheromone; however, scientific data to support these claims are scant.[10] The vomeronasal organ is an auxiliary olfactory sense organ that is responsible for the detection of pheromones as more than just an odor. ..." 2
It has been conjectured that psychopaths in general have a poor sense of smell. If this is true, then what makes it 'poor'? Could it be possible that perhaps they just interpret smell differently than normal humans? Perhaps their perception of smell just falls within a different range than that of the general public? This would mean that this sense organ is in a class all its own and that the psychopath sensory world is one that is unknowable to us.
If psychopaths indeed do have "difficulty" with olfactory senses, in others words, are anosmic, this doesn't necessarily mean that they have no sense of smell, but perhaps perceive smells differently. It seems quite a few of us do:
"Nearly half the adult human population does not perceive an odor when sniffing androstenone (5 alpha-androst-16-en-3-one), a volatile steroid found in human perspiration, boar saliva, some pork products (e.g., bacon), truffles, and celery. This variation in ability to perceive androstenone has a significant heritable component, suggesting that androstenone insensitivity is in part determined genetically. We now report that the ability to perceive androstenone was induced in 10 of 20 initially insensitive subjects who were systematically exposed to androstenone. Since olfactory neurons of the olfactory epithelium undergo periodic replacement from differentiating basal cells, and assuming the induction of sensitivity to be peripheral, we propose that a portion of the apparently anosmic human population does in fact possess olfactory neurons with specific receptors for androstenone. Such neurons may undergo clonal expansion, or selection of lineages with more receptors or receptors of higher affinity, in response to androstenone stimulation, much in the manner of lymphocytes responding to antigenic stimulation, thus raising odor stimulation to the level of conscious perception. As a guide to further study of the genetics and mechanism of variation of androstenone perception, we provisionally envisage three categories of human subjects, the truly anosmic, the inducible, and those subjects who either are constitutionally sensitive or have already experienced incidental induction." 3
Sense of smell and taste
Continuing along the thought regarding lizards and their olfactory senses, I wondered if there could be some link between their sense of smell and taste as the two senses are often connected. Here's some of what I found:
"Curiously, the novel linkage of the tongue and the VNO in squamate reptiles - the vomeronasal system (VNS) - is not a substitute for, but rather a complement to, the usual set of vertebrate chemical senses, including, in most cases, well developed nasal olfactory (NOS) and gustatory systems (Box 1), We still know little about how these senses interact (see below), but the depth and breadth of our knowledge of squamate chemical senses has mushroomed since Burghardt's pivotal 1970 synthesis, recently culminating in two important reviews and an international conference. What is clearly established is the diversity of functions and behaviors in which the chemicals senses lay a critical role, and the overall importance of the chemical senses in the ecology of squamate reptiles. Chemoreception is known to mediate prey choice, prey location, foraging behavior, self and individual recognition, kin recognition, mate choice, mate location, shelter location, den location, trail following, aggregation, predator identification, exploratory behavior, defensive behavior, courtship behavior, copulatory behavior and virtually all other aspects of social behavior in some if not most lineages..." 4
The above appears to point to VNS being a crucial factor in emotions or thoughts that drive behaviors. If our behaviors are directed by odors, this may explain somewhat one of the reasons why people not only are attracted to psychopaths but find it so difficult to remove themselves from situations with them? Perhaps there is an abundance in androstenone in the male psychopath that many women find irresistable? A clever ploy of nature designed to promote the psychopath species.
In addition, perhaps the psychopath also responds to androstenone aggressively as well as other chemicals that provide them with the covert knowledge of prey that is particularly palatable?
The same article mentioned pheromones as related to lizards and so I thought that perhaps it's the utilization of VNS that allows for the psychopath to distinguish potential prey. In a further search on Jacobson's Organ, I found this:
"In addition to taste and smell, most vertebrates use Jacobson's organ (also termed the vomeronasal organ and vomeronasal pit) to detect trace quantities of chemicals.
While snakes and other reptiles flick substances into Jacobson's organ with their tongues, several mammals (e.g., cats) exhibit the Flehmen reaction. When 'Flehmening', an animal appears to sneer as it curls its upper lip to better expose the twin vomeronasal organs for chemical sensing. In mammals, Jacobson's organ is used not simply to identify minute quantities of chemicals, but also for subtle communication between other members of the same species, through the emission and reception of chemical signals called pheromones." 4
The neurons in the vomeronasal organ that detect pheromones is an example of a distance chemoreceptor. Taste buds are an example of a direct chemoreceptor.
Chemoreceptors are "... a sensory receptor that transduces a chemical signal into an action potential. In more general terms, a chemosensor detects certain chemical stimuli in the environment."
A good example of a sense organ chemoreceptor is "The emissions of a predator's food source, such as odors or pheromones, may be in the air or on a surface where the food source has been. Cells in the head, usually the air passages or mouth, have chemical receptors on their surface that change when in contact with the emissions. The change does not stop there. It passes in either chemical or electrochemical form to the central processor, the brain or spinal cord. The resulting output from the CNS (central nervous system) makes body actions that will engage the food and enhance survival." 5
Is sense of smell as we "know" it related to the vomeronasal organ?
In
Jacobson's Organ, Watson says regarding sense of smell and how the odour-to-brain sequence (what we normally think of a the ability to smell) differs from the function of the vomeronasal organ yet can coordinate with it:
Page 7
Jacobson's Organ by Lyall Watson
"Smell is a chemical sense. What the receptor cells in the nose do is translate chemical information into electrical signals. These travel along the olfactory nerves into the cranial cavity, where they gather in the olfactory bulbs. These, in turn, feed the cerebral cortex, where association takes place and nameless signals become transformed into the fragrance of a favorite rose or the musky warning of an irritable skunk". 6
"Trained noses can identify hundreds of thousands of odors, far more than our minds can describe. Smells sit right on the tops of our tongues and linger there, because we cannot utter their names. It is almost impossible to describe even the most familiar scents to someone else who has never experienced them. And part of this confusions exists, because of the way we ourselves experience them."
"The odour-to-brain sequence I have just described in very bald terms is not the only way we smell. Our nasal chambers are connected to the outside air directly through the nostrils, and indirectly through the throat by 'inside air' that comes perfused with the flavours of food and drink, and the products of digestion. All this information goes directly to the olfactory bulbs of the brain. But riding on the side of each of the swellings in our heads are other smaller lobes called the accessory bulbs, which get their news of the world from an altogether different source: the twin-tubed Organ of Jacobson."
"But the most interesting thing is that the Jacobson's Organs are not receptive to ordinary odours. They respond most often to a range of substances which have large molecules, but often no detectable odour. And they communicate not with the olfactory bulbs and cortex, but with the accessory bulbs and that part of the brain that coordinates mating and other basic emotions. Recent evidence suggests also that the two separate and parallel systems of odour detection cooperate in surprising ways to produce novel sensibilities not achievable by them on their own.
Moran, Jafek, Stensaas and Monti-Bloch are now part of a small group of distinguished scientists who believe they have discovered a new sense organ, one that detects chemical signals previously thought to be beyond the scope of normal human sensitivity. They call it the vomeronasal organ, rather than Jacobson's Organ" 7
So it would seem that a sort of synesthesia is occurring with VNS - a blending of smell and taste. It seems I have more questions than answers but hopefully it will provide some food for thought.
References
1.
Jacobson's Organ, Introduction, xiv
2. Kirk-Smith, M.D., and Booth, D.A. (1980) "Effect of androstenone on choice of location in others' presence". In H. van der Starre (Ed.),
Olfaction and Taste VII, London: Information Retrieval Ltd., pp.397-400.
3. "Ability to perceive androstenone can be acquired by ostensibly anosmic people.".
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1989 October. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=2813372&query_hl=4&itool=pubmed_docsum. Retrieved 2007-09-25.
4. http://chemistry.about.com/cs/medical/a/aa051601a.htm
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoreceptor
6. Agosta, William C.
Chemical Communication: The Language of Pheromones. New York: Scientific American Library (1992).
7.
Jacobson's Organ, page 9
