Just like your voice is converted into an electrical signal in the telephone so that it can be sent along a wire. The scent signal is then transmitted to the processing part of the brain which sorts the scent into categories. A smell of meat cooking on a barbecue may trigger the desire to eat, for example. Or it may trigger the libido - that is the psychic drive in the human instinct which is concerned with sexual arousal. The scent molecule acts directly on the instinct so that it triggers a natural behavior pattern in response to the stimulus provided by the pheromone scent.
Women can subconsciously detect pheromones at a rate about a thousand times better than men.
Psychologists have also found that women are more adept at decoding other forms of body language. And men tend to produce pheromones at a greater rate when they are agitated or angry. University experiments have also indicated that males who gave off sex pheromones in the high range also appeared to have more drive. This has led some to conclude that men who give off higher levels of the sex pheromone would tend to be more successful in life than those who give off low levels or none at all. The two male pheromones androstenone and androstenol have been isolated and can be reproduced in the laboratory.