researchers find humans are wired to respond to animals

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-09/ciot-cbc090811.php

Public release date: 8-Sep-2011
Contact: Deborah Williams-Hedges
California Institute of Technology
Captivated by critters: Caltech and UCLA researchers find humans are wired to respond to animals

PASADENA, Calif.—Some people feel compelled to pet every furry animal they see on the street, while others jump at the mere sight of a shark or snake on the television screen. No matter what your response is to animals, it may be thanks to a specific part of your brain that is hardwired to rapidly detect creatures of the nonhuman kind. In fact, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and UCLA report that neurons throughout the amygdala—a center in the brain known for processing emotional reactions—respond preferentially to images of animals.

Their findings were described in a study published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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"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 Florian Mormann, lead author on the paper and a former postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Biology at Caltech. "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."

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