Pheromones 2: the Smell of Wallstreet

Nowadays billions of dollars change hands on a daily basis, and some of it may be due to 'rational depression' as opposed to the 'irrational exuberance' it started with. 

Federal Reserve board chairman  Greenspan warned the markets then (in 1996) "....irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions...." Uncanny how accurate his insight was then, about what is truly happening now. Despite his own warning, Greenspan never put the breaks on. He believed that the market to a large extent regulates itself and let it go at that. (He says he really regrets things now).

Let's examine this a little further: 'put the breaks on'.... on what dare I ask ? The traders ?  Well....turns out that it is not exactly the traders who are to blame. A new study finds that it is their hormones. A study by John  Coates, neuro-scientist finds that successful traders (during the boom periods) were heavily influenced by positive feedback loops fueled by increasing levels of testosterone. Pumped Up !  It is like a winning streak among athletes: successive victories push testosterone levels higher and higher, which gives the winning  athletes an advantage for the next game. Until they become stupid of course and start taking risks based on delusions of grandeur.

Testosterone, you guessed it, is a hormone produced by the testes, cojones, your 'balls' so to speak.  It is a sexual hormone mainly in men, responsible for the unfolding of (male) sexual maturation. Once matured, an abundance of testosterone makes you feel energized,  'virile', and yes... even exuberant. This is apparently what happened to the traders on the floor --they were starting to feel they ruled the world in a euphoric, sexualized frenzy. Must have been very, very addicting.

Vice versa, when the markets tumble Dr. Coates measured a dramatic increase in cortisol production in the bodies of those same traders,  a hormone associated with a response to stress. Cortisol is produced by the adrenal glands, sitting on top of the kidneys, and it is experienced as the fear that goes together with  fight or flight situations. Once triggered by pituitary gland (in the brain) the cortisol steroid immediately enters the bloodstream, increasing the blood pressure and levels of blood sugar. It is in drug culture terms "a rush" since it alters the state of mind so immediately. In the somewhat longer run high levels of cortisol may undermine the immunity system and can lead to depression and anxiety, potentially aggravated by large intake of sugars (soda pop) and junk food .

While I enjoy the direction of the thinking of Dr. Coates, there is something lacking in it. While hormones may explain some of the extreme behaviors of the individual traders on the floor, it doesn't explain the mass behavior that causes the massive swings in the market. 

I would like to suggest that there are pheromones involved here that 

communicate the particular state of mind one trader to another. Much like the bees releasing an alarm pheromone causing the other bees to act aggressively 'en mass', on wall street at times pheromones are floating around causing a smell.... a certain smell....the smell of fear, which then triggers the pituitary gland which in its turn activates the adrenals secreting cortisol. How intricate!

The nose, backed up by a whole 'olfactory system' provides for the 'chemo sensory sense', the only sense that hard wires directly through neurons into the brain. For some bizarre reason, we humans have lost touch with smell even though 20+ percent of our brains (and dna) is devoted to the olfactory system. 

Pheromone in Greek means: to bear a hormone. In other words pheromones are chemical information packages secreted by one individual,  which once they are picked up by the nose and olfactory system of another individual, trigger hormones which then determines much of the subsequent behavior, such as bidding the market up (testosterone) or bidding it down (cortisol).

So funny: Our eyes are fixated  so much  the 'scoreboard' of the stock exchange --the always creeping ticker on the bottom of our tv screens. This is our human fixation and sensory bias anno 21st century which has dictated our perception and our ability to give meaning to large conceptual constructs like 'the economy'. Yet we know so much less about the hormones which cause the large swings in the 'mood' of wallstreet. What is even more remarkable is that we are completely ignorant about the pheromones which trigger those hormones... the smell of wallstreet....ruling the world. 

Pheromones 1: the Chemical Language of Bees

One of the things I have been documenting at Ecoversity is the behavior of bees. You can see some of the material at Ecoversity TV.

When looking at the bees on a big screen tv, slowed down to about 10% of the speed you see and hear things that you miss when the bees move at their normal speed –too fast. For example you can recognize that each bee is an individual with a face and features. Bees are social animals that see, touch and recognize each other, very much like humans. The bee buzzing sound when slowed down becomes audible and differentiated to the human ear in a different way: there actually is a tremendous variety in sounds made by bees, it’s like a chorus with different singing voices weaving their way through. The bee songs at that speed are really very much like whale songs.

But the language of the bees that is probably most similar in its complexity with the human language is the chemical communication through pheromones among bees. Pheremone in greek means: 'to bear a hormone", it is a trigger of behavior.

The bees have a series of 15 different glands that can each secrete a series of chemicals that are known as pheromones. We humans understand the meaning of some of the distinct chemicals in terms of bee behavior. For instance we have identified the koschevnikov gland which produces a powerful alarm pheromone which is secreted when bees are stinging and which induces many other bees to behave aggressively. Or the nasonov gland which produces a sweet rose smelling attractant that orients worker bees in foraging, hive identification and stabilization of swarms.

It seems to me that the bee pheromones are similar to letters in human language. Different combinations have different meanings. Though we humans can kind of decipher the pheromone letters individually, we have no idea how complex and 'intelligent' the bee chemical language may truly be.

One day my friend Stephen from Biomagic and I were talking about the bee pheromones in the context of the Colony Collapse Disorder. (Before I go into this heavy subject let me first say something positive: the topbar hives at Ecoversity seem very healthy to me. I looked at them this morning and in the unusually warm November here in Santa Fe the bees are still busy collecting.)

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has been mysterious...whole colonies of bees are disappearing altogether all at once.
Isn't it reasonable to speculate that all kinds of chemicals set loose in our environment are interfering in the subtleties of pheromone based communication among bees? Not just a few of the really terrible culprits such as the nicotinoid pesticides that are being produced (by the same people who bring us aspirin (Bayer) among others). All kinds of petrochemicals that are set loose in our high intensity fossil fuel society, may well interfere in the language between bees.... they may even disturb the chemical communication between flowers and bees.

For years there have been reports of disoriented bees, one way or another. Could it be that the bees are experiencing their version of the tower of Babel?




In some of the coming blogs I would like to speculate more about pheromones, and their role not just in bee behavior, but also in humans and other animals.