Ok before you start bottling up your own supply or you start walking around sniffing people’s armpits, just know that this discovery is still in the early stages of testing.
Scientists in Sweden have discovered that the smell of armpit sweat can activate pathways in the brain linked to emotions that offer a calming outcome.
These scientists haven’t actually come to a conclusion yet, but they have received an invitation to Paris to present whatever they have of their findings during a medical conference.
They also hypothesized that the scent of someone’s scent can help communicate their feelings which is why they started this research in the first place – to see if sniffing another person’s sweat would have the same effect.
An experiment was held to test this theory where a group of women were brought into a room and were given different vials of sweat to sniff.
Some of the women were just given fresh air but not told that it was fresh air. This caused a placebo effect among them.
It was found that the socially anxious women in the group responded more positively to therapy when they sniffed actual human sweat.
The lead scientist in this whole discovery is Elisa Vigna and she says,
“Sweat produced while someone was happy had the same effect as someone who had been scared by a movie clip.
So there may be something about human chemo-signals in sweat generally which affects the response to treatment.”
I think I’m just going to risk being socially anxious for the rest of my life and take these scientists’ words for it, because I could never.
For more on this, click here.
