An interesting study suggesting that primates have neuron systems designed specifically to detect snakes.
Snakes and their relationships with humans and other primates have attracted broad attention from multiple fields of study, but not, surprisingly, from neuroscience, despite the involvement of the visual system and strong behavioral and physiological evidence that humans and other primates can detect snakes faster than innocuous objects. Here, we report the existence of neurons in the primate medial and dorsolateral pulvinar that respond selectively to visual images of snakes. Compared with three other categories of stimuli (monkey faces, monkey hands, and geometrical shapes), snakes elicited the strongest, fastest responses, and the responses were not reduced by low spatial filtering. These findings integrate neuroscience with evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, herpetology, and primatology by identifying a neurobiological basis for primates’ heightened visual sensitivity to snakes, and adding a crucial component to the growing evolutionary perspective that snakes have long shaped our primate lineage.
That last sentence refers to co-author Lynne Isbell’s hypothesis that interactions between snakes and primates played a key role in shaping the evolution of primates, especially their visual systems. Isbell claims, for example, that the existence of snakes may have given rise in hominids of the ability to point at things of significance, which in turn is a stepping stone to full blown language.