Why babies smell good enough to eat
It's not just you
It turns out that when a new mom says her baby is so sweet, so deliciously cute, that it is good enough to eat, she is expressing an urge linked to the survival of the species.
The smell of a newborn triggers the same reward circuits in the brain as the ones that come from satisfying a craving for food, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Psychology. It's the same feeling an addict feels from drugs. Sex can also do the trick.
"It is in fact the sating of desire," Dr Johannes Frasnelli of Montreal University, one of the paper's authors, tells Britain's Daily Mail.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The researchers figure this has to be something moms are hardwired to feel to jumpstart maternal instincts. "Thankfully for the continuation of our species, this Medean impulse is fleeting: The researchers hypothesize that the reward circuit's response evolved to encourage mothers to feed and protect their kids, not to really eat them," says Eoin O'Carroll at The Christian Science Monitor.
So, how did the researchers figure this out? They presented the scents of a baby's pajamas to two groups of 15 women. The subjects in one group had given birth within the preceding six weeks; the others had never had babies.
The scientists then scanned the women's brains, and found that the new moms experienced a surge of the pleasure chemical dopamine in the caudate nucleus — the brain's reward center — of the new mothers, even though the babies they were sniffing were not their own. The other women didn't experience the same chemical jolt.
Men weren't included in the study, so it's still an open question whether dads are programmed differently from non-dads.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
If there's something that didn't ring true in this paper, says Eve Vawter at Mommyish, it's that the non-mothers — or anybody else, for that matter — would be able to resist that delicious baby aroma.
Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
-
Today's political cartoons - November 2, 2024
Cartoons Saturday's cartoons - anti-fascism, early voter turnout, and more
By The Week US Published
-
Geoff Capes obituary: shot-putter who became the World’s Strongest Man
In the Spotlight The 'mighty figure' was a two-time Commonwealth Champion and world-record holder
By The Week UK Published
-
Israel attacks Iran: a 'limited' retaliation
Talking Point Iran's humiliated leaders must decide how to respond to Netanyahu's measured strike
By The Week UK Published