We all know that babies learn about the people and world around them from watching and imitating what they see.  Well, apparently we continue this into adulthood.

A new study from researchers at Utrecht University finds that we can smell fear and disgust and when we do it can trigger the same emotion in our brains.  The study’s findings can be found in the journal Psychological Science.

The New York Daily News reports that this isn’t the first research to claim that humans can smell fear.  So how did they find this information out? 

Researchers tested the sweaty armpits of 10 men while they watched films such as The Shining or gross-out scenes from MTV’s television series Jackass.

They then asked 36 women to take a visual search test that recorded their facial expressions and eye movements as they inhaled  chemosignals of the men’s sweat.  So what did the researchers find? 

When sniffing the “fear sweat,” the women opened their eyes widely in a fearful expression.  When smelling sweat from men who were disgusted, the women grimaced as if in disgust.

 So Science is pointing to the fact that we are all connected and we affect the people around us in ways we did not previously know.  

So next time your in a crowded post office, waiting for important news in a room full of people, or in a classroom filled with rambunctious middle schoolers, try to calm yourself and bare a smile no matter how slight.

 Remember other’s can SMELL FEAR and it’s contagious !

Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is a neurological disorder where people cannot recognize faces.  There are varying degrees to this disorder, but the effects can be devastating for all sufferers.   In a few extreme cases face blind people can’t even recognize their own face.

In a past blog, we reported that science has not yet been able to concretely say what areas of the brain are exclusively dedicated to face processing. But they do know that there are two sides to this spectrum.  There are the sufferers of “face blindness” as mentioned above and there are a very few of us who find it difficult to NOT recognize a face even if they only encountered it briefly years ago.  The latter are dubbed “super recognizers”.

NBC News reports on the progress that science is making in understanding the brain and where face recognition and face blindness originate.  Researchers Parvizi and Kalant Grill-Spector, from Stanford, wrote an article published in the Journal of Neuroscience that they have found critical areas of the brain that are responsible for face recognition, which they call “mFus- and pFus-faces”.

Scientists have known for a while that people, and at least some primates, have an area of the brain that’s responsible for processing faces specifically.  We’ve evolved it, Grill-Spector explained in an interview.  

Parvizi and Grill-Spector concluded that if the fusiform gyrus, located in the temporal lobe, is injured, people can lose the ability to recognize faces, even of people they’ve known for a long time.  People can also be born with prosopagnosia.

Grill-Spector goes on to state, “because we’re social beings. We need to know who our friends and enemies are, who’s a family member, who we can trust.“

To read the entire article click here.

  Have you had experience with this disorder?  
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