LOS ANGELES: A study recently published in the journal Nature Neuroscience by a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) reveals that the human brain instinctively responds to images of animals. According to the study “A category-specific response to animals in the right human amygdale,” the team of 12 scientists recorded the single-neuron responses to images of people, animals, landmarks, or objects in the amygdala of 41 epilepsy patients at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. “Our study shows that neurons in the human amygdala respond preferentially to pictures of animals, meaning that we saw the most amount of activity in cells when the patients looked at cats or snakes versus buildings or people,” says Dr. Florian Mormann, lead author on the paper. “This preference extends to cute as well as ugly or dangerous animals and appears to be independent of the emotional contents of the pictures. “Remarkably, we find this response behavior only in the right and not in the left amygdala.” The amydala is known to help regulate emotions, especially those that are closely related to survival, and plays a huge role in the processing of fear. “This is a pretty novel finding, since most amygdala research in the past was usually about faces of people and emotions related to fear rather than pictures of animals,” adds Ralph Adolphs, a coauthor and Professor of Biology at Caltech. “Nobody would have guessed that cells in the amygdala respond more to animals than they do to human faces, and in particular that they respond to all kinds of animals, not just dangerous ones. I think this will stimulate more research and has the potential to help us better understand phobias of animals.” What is the ramification of this finding? Perhaps it is an indication that animals play a significant role in the evolution of humans since times immemorial. BM
