Spray Me, Pay Me

Most of us laughed pretty damn hard when we learned that the Air Force was think­ing about spritz­ing ene­mies of free­dom with aphro­disi­acs, to tem­porar­ily turn them gay. But, appar­ently, some researchers at the University of Zurich found the idea down­right inspi­ra­tional.
The brains haven’t found the so-​​called “gay sex bomb,” yet. But they have come up with a hor­mone spray that makes folks almost com­i­cally naive, accord­ing to the Washington Post.

Researchers had some vol­un­teers inhale oxy­tocin [also known as the “hor­mone of love” or “cud­dle chem­i­cal” — ed.] and then exam­ined how they and those who inhaled a placebo invested money in a mock trans­ac­tion.
The trans­ac­tion involved tak­ing a risk: hand­ing over money to a “banker” who had the option of return­ing the invest­ment with a profit or with­hold­ing prin­ci­pal and profit, leav­ing the investor with noth­ing. The exper­i­ment was a mea­sure of the trust that the investors had in the bankers.
Volunteers who inhaled oxy­tocin were more likely to trust the banker with money and risk larger sums, the researchers said in an arti­cle pub­lished yes­ter­day in the jour­nal Nature.
The sci­en­tists said they made sure the chem­i­cal was not merely enhanc­ing risk-​​taking behav­ior by sub­sti­tut­ing bankers with com­put­ers. Without the inter­ac­tion with a human, the hor­mone had no effect.

Antonio Damasio, a University of Iowa neu­rol­o­gist, tells Nature that the spray might be a bit super­flu­ous. “Modern adver­tis­ing already uses tricks to get us to trust a brand that prob­a­bly make us boost our own oxy­tocin lev­els. ‘It lures you in with images of won­der­ful land­scapes or sex, and it prob­a­bly works in exactly the same way,’” he says. (big ups: Ed)

June 2nd, 2005 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.