Chemical Communication Quotes

Any woman who is currently with a man is with him partly because she loves the way he smells. And if we haven't smelled you for a day or two and then we suddenly are within inches of you, we swoon. We get light-headed. It's intoxicating. It's heady.

Before sight and sound hijacked our attention, we shared with all life a sort of common sense, a chemical sense that depended on direct contact with matter in the water or the air.

You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have - while we have consciousness, toolmaking, language, they have biochemistry.

Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.

Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

[Bacteria] have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that ... allows bacteria to be multicellular. In the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference.

I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.

No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind.