Essentials: How Smell, Taste & Pheromones Shape Behavior

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. Today we're going to talk about chemical sensing. We're going to talk about the sense of smell, our ability to detect odors in our environment.

We're also going to talk about taste, our ability to detect chemicals and make sense of chemicals that are put in our mouth and into our digestive tract. And we are going to talk about chemicals that are made by other human beings that powerfully modulate the way that we feel our hormones. and our health. Now that last category are sometimes called pheromones. However, whether or not pheromones exist in humans is rather controversial.

There actually hasn't been a clear example of a true human pheromonal effect, but what is absolutely clear, what is undeniable, is that there are chemicals that human beings make and release in things like tears onto our skin and sweat and even breath that powerfully modulate or control the biology of other individuals. There are things floating around in the environment, which we call volatile chemicals. So when you actually smell something, like let's say you smell a wonderfully smelling rose or cake, yes, you are inhaling the particles. into your nose.

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