Snake! Your Brain Has A Special Corner Just For Them

Ever stop in your tracks to find a snake right under your feet? This may be an evolutionary trait of primates

Anthropologist Lynne Isbell was running through a glade in central Kenya in 1992 when something suddenly caused her to freeze in her tracks. "I stopped just in front of a cobra," she says. "It was raised with its hood spread out."

Isbell, who is at the University of California, Davis, says she has spent the past couple of decades trying to understand how she could have reacted before her conscious brain even had a chance to think — cobra!

"At first I thought it was luck," she says. "But now I'm pretty sure that it's not luck. It's a reflection of 60 million years of evolutionary history working on my visual system."

The answer involves monkeys, the evolution of primate vision and a part of the brain called the pulvinar, which Isbell explains in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the years after her encounter with the cobra, Isbell developed a theory that snakes are a major reason that humans and other primates evolved really good vision

NPR

I had this happen to me when i was a young 12 year old out deer hunting, I damn near stepped on a rattlesnake. Scared the hell out of me, 4 rounds from my 30-06 ended the threat. Of course it also ended by hunt for the morning.

On a walk this weekend I just had a garter snake almost give me a heart attack. I know I have nothing to fear, but the way they move always totally startles me.

I can hold a snake that someone hands to me, and I love the feel of their skin. But see one outside loose, crossing my path or just laying there not moving, and I freeze. I even ran over a garter snake on my bike when I was about 7 and did the same thing. Just froze. And I hadnt really seen anything about snakes before then. No scary Snakes on a Plane movies in my brain.