In these days of ever-increasing workplace commitments and competitiveness, how do we make time to find that special someone? Don't bother, use drugs instead.
Singles, salespeople, managers and employees and now being targeted with a new wonder-drug, oxytocin, that will evoke strong feelings of trust in those around you.
Just spray it on your shirt and be amazed by how your social life and career improve! Well, so the sales pitch goes.
Oxytocin is actually a textbook hormone that is involved in contraction of the uterus for birth and milk let-down when babies suckle at the breast.
The new market for oxytocin is based on a 2005 paper published in the scientific magazine, Nature.
This work showed that giving 24 International Units (about 50 micrograms) of oxytocin as a nasal spray increased the amount of ‘monetary units' that people (investors) would give to other people (trustees) to invest in a game of trust where the investors had no control over the amount of return they would receive from the trustees.
Interestingly, if the trustee was set-up as a computer and not an actual person, the oxytocin didn't have an effect.
This fascinating study of human behaviour was inspired by ground-breaking work from US scientists on the sex lives of voles.
Prairie voles are monogamous whereas montane and meadow voles are polygamous.
The important difference between these species is that they have different levels of the receptor for oxytocin in parts of their brain that control behaviour.
Oxytocin is released into the brain during mating (yes, in humans too!) and this appears to be important for forming life-long bonds in prairie voles; with fewer receptors for oxytocin, oxytocin fails to affect the brains of montane voles and meadow voles in the same way.
No surprise that oxytocin's more recent nicknames include ‘the love drug' and ‘the cuddle chemical'.
So the big question is; will wearing oxytocin really increase people's trust in you? But there are other questions to be asked.
If you are going to get that much oxytocin up someone's nose, won't you annoy them in the process (try getting a few grains of salt up some else's nose without them noticing)?
If you wear oxytocin, who is going to be exposed to the heaviest dose (if you are of a trusting nature, watch out for yourself)? How will the oxytocin work if the person who you are trying to influence doesn't have the right receptors anyway? As for the big question, I can't say for certain whether wearing oxytocin will affect people's trust in you.
I can say that I wouldn't spend a cent of my money on oxytocin-based products and that I wouldn't trust someone who used them to try to mess with my mind.
- Dr Colin Brown
Centre for Neuroendocrinology and Department of Physiology, University of Otago