No. 51

When it comes to stimulating the brain, man's best friend has it licked

They can be the source of great joy and friendship or a cause of fear and panic. Whatever your response to animals, it appears hundreds of thousands of years of close interaction between man and beast has left an imprint on our brains.

Scientists have found a specific brain region, the amygdala, reacts to animals far more dramatically than to people, places or things.

''This selectivity … may reflect the importance that animals held throughout our evolutionary past,'' Florian Mormann, a neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology, who led the study, said.

The researchers suggest animals have been such an important part of human life that a specific part of the brain had developed to process information about them, in a similar way regions had formed to process reading and language.

Read more |  The Age, 06.09.11

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