简介：
The Scent of Sexual Sweat
爱人的气味最性感
Do you like the scent of your Valentine? The Journal of Neuroscience reports that certain regions in women's brains are activated when they smell "sexual sweat." Christie Nicholson reports
你喜欢爱人身上的气味吗？《神经科学》期刊报道，当女性闻到异性的汗液，她们的大脑的特定区域会产生兴奋。
撰文/播音 克里斯蒂•尼科尔森(Christie Nicholson)
翻译 李轩
I think it was my mom, embarrassingly, who once told me, “You’ve got to love the smell of your man.” Sounds cryptic, but studies have hinted that humans might detect pheromones, or that women are attracted to the scents of symmetrical men, or that a variation in genes determines the draw of a male scent.
“自家男人身上的味道最好闻了。”让人怪不好意思的是，这好像还是我妈告诉我的...听起来很玄，但已经有研究发现，人类或许可以感受到一种名叫“信息素”的化学物质，男性因为基因多样性而具有不同的气味，使女性被自己心仪之人的气味所吸引。
Now, The Journal of Neuroscience published a study that shows women recognize male sexual sweat.
现在，《神经科学》期刊发表了一项的研究显示，女性能识别出男性汗液中的“性息”。
You might wonder, as the blogger Neurocritic did, what is “sexual sweat?” The paper doesn’t provide the chemistry, but in the study, it’s the sweat excreted as men watch erotic videos. Researchers collected “neutral sweat” while the men watched educational documentaries.
你也许会像Neurocritic的博主一样，想知道到底是什么化学成分起了作用。论文并没有说明这一点，但在实验中，这是当男性观看情色影片时排出的汗液。研究人员也收集了男性观看教育纪录片时排出的“中性汗”。
Women sniffed the scents while their brains were scanned by an fMRI.
当受试女性闻到这些汗液时，她们的大脑会接受功能性磁共振（fMRI）扫描。
All but one of the 19 women did not recognize the scents as human, but their brains distinguished the sexual scent. Two regions reacted more to the sexual sweat than any of the other smells: the orbitofrontal cortex (an olfactory area) and the fusiform gyrus, responsible for face/body recognition.
除了一个女性外，其余19个女性虽然没有辨别出这是人类的汗液，但她们的大脑分辨出了异性的气味。相比于“中性汗”，闻到“性感汗液”时，受试女性大脑的两个区域会更加活跃。这两个区域分别是与嗅觉有关的眶额皮质，和负责面部与身体识别的梭状回。
The authors speculate that activation of the fusiform may be the brain recognizing the human quality of sexual sweat, but this leap requires more study.
论文作者推测，梭状回被激活也许代表着大脑识别出了汗液中的“性征”，但这仍需进一步的研究。
In the meantime try your own experiment…when you see your Valentine this week, lean in and take a deep breath.How do you feel?
你也可以自己做个实验：下次见到他时，躺进他的怀里深吸一口气吧——感觉怎么样？
（题图来源：http://www.girlschase.com/）
