The wonders of science never cease. A recent study by neurobiologists from Israel and the United States of America has revealed that male aggression loses its edge when faced with tears. This might not seem so wonderful at first, even though the route to the result was quite exciting — magnetic resource imaging scans of the brains of players playing a psychological game in a laboratory. But it is the cause of lowered aggression that constitutes the wonder. It is not compassion, sympathy or communicated sadness at all. In other words, the karuna rasa of Bharata or Kalidasa has little to do with the calming of aggression; effects of that emotion are best encountered in poetry and art, or in some human situations, not all. Violent spouses, merciless rapists, heartless lynch-mobs would lose their favourite pastimes entirely if the sight of tears triggered sympathy or compassion. This is another illuminating sidelight thrown on society by the report: its findings make clear that male aggression is not softened by a woman’s or child’s or a helpless man’s tears through pity or kindness.
Smell is the great revelation. Sniffing tears causes changes in the brain’s centres of smell and aggression, lowering the latter and offering a ‘chemical protection blanket’ against it. It is all in the chemicals then. And the ability to smell tears. No doubt rodents, among which scientists first spotted the reaction to tears, have keen noses. The twitching noses of mice and rabbits would leave no doubt about that. For human beings, catching the characteristic salty smell of the sea is easy, often redolent of fish near a beach, but a sea is a fairly large body of water. Women have been known to weep an ocean, true, but the expression is either metaphorical, poetic or part of myth. So it is indeed thrilling to be informed that the human nose can smell tears, that human beings have truly wonderful — superhuman? — abilities of which they are seldom aware.
But one aspect of the finding needs clarification. From how far can tears be smelled? Not from beating distance surely? Or even raping distance? Because terrified or pleading tears should have stopped male aggressors in their tracks; violence against women or children would not be an issue at all. In such a paradise, finely conceived tests would be purely academic exercises, pushing the boundaries of knowledge towards unknown horizons with no connections to everyday experience. Those with the keenest noses — the chef, the gourmet, the wine or tea taster, the detective, the doctor, the gardener, the journalist or other any smell-dependent professional — have not been rumoured to smell tears, their own or of others. Maybe they do, without knowing it, and so never beat up their wives? The smell of tears has a chemical effect on the aggressive centres of their brains, evidently by wafting past their conscious sniffing. It is no good talking back to science.
