Prof's book challenges ideas about brain chemistry

For Penn professor Richard Doty, the question “What drives human behavior?” is at the heart of his research.

More than 80 people came to the Penn Bookstore to hear Doty discuss his new book, The Great Pheromone Myth, which challenges the prevailing ideas about the role chemicals play in human behavior and aims to undermine the status quo.

“Science progresses by looking at the strengths and weaknesses of all our concepts,” Doty said. He believes that nearly all phenomena attributed to pheromones are also affected by learning, context and novelty, and therefore depend just as much on the receiver as the transmitter. While there are chemicals in the body that could potentially be pheromones, their existence has yet to be proven as fact.

Instead of using the idea of pheromones to guide research, Doty would like to explore alternatives to what he considers unverifiable. The pursuit of pheromones, in his words, is “a logical fallacy.” In his view, scientists looking for pheromones can label any chemical or cluster of chemicals as a “pheromone” without having to discern their exact function.

Dillon Schriver, a College freshman and a student of Doty’s, further explained his point. “Even though the pheromone phenomenon has been observed in insects, you have to be careful when you transfer those findings to the animal or human world, especially when the phenomenon is not observed during experimentation,” he said.

Doty hopes his anti-establishment idea will spark controversy and amend popular beliefs on the subject.

College freshman Ryan Sila enjoyed the talk. “This is why I came to Penn,” he said. “I can study what I find interesting outside the classroom and be smarter after an hour of listening than I was before.”

To the same effect, Doty wants to enlighten his readers. The past 15 years, Doty has worked on the book “to explicate the wonderful complexity of mammalian behavior.”

He added, “It’s not as simplistic as the pheromone concept would imply.”

Doty is director of Penn’s Smell and Taste Center and inventor of the widely used UPSIT test for assessing smell function. He has authored or edited over 350 scientific publications, including “The Neurology of Olfaction” and “Smell in Health and Disease.”

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