Many people may have seen this scene in some film and television dramas: an ancient man sitting cross-legged on the ground, with a cobra lying in front of him. When the old man played the flute, the snake stood up. Get up, and then follow the melody and start swinging up and down left and right. The scene is very exotic.

Such scenes also exist in real life. For example, in Arabia and India, there are still many people who make a living by performing this skill. So, what kind of music does a snake need to hear to make it sway like that?

The answer may be disappointing. Snakes actually think that any music sounds the same, with one exception: they hate loud rock music.

Cobras have no external ears, but that does not mean they have no hearing. They can feel vibrations from the ground through the muscles of their tails and abdomen. Just like a radar system, even a mouse running across the mud ten meters away will attract a cobra, which is much weaker than the sound of a flute.

There is a study at the University of Illinois in the United States on whether cobras can hear airborne sounds. Researchers connected cobras with measuring wires to specialized equipment, which allowed them to accurately observe the effects of airborne sound on the snakes' brains. The final result of the research was that people found that they could not only feel the vibrations of the ground, but also the sounds in the air.

So, why does the cobra stand up and dance after hearing the music? It's very simple. It's actually an instinctive behavior in response to danger. As mentioned before, for them, if a mouse makes noise nearby, this weak noise means that prey may be present for cobras. signal.

After getting used to it, they can distinguish which sounds are the sounds of mice and which are the sounds of elephants passing by. They are divided into meaningful and meaningless sounds, which they have summarized through experience. The snake does not react to the sound of meaning and continues to do its own thing.

Snake dancers usually have to train a cobra to be tame enough before they start to perform. At the beginning of the training, the fangs of these cobras will be pulled out. It is not necessary to pull them out, but the trainer Special protective clothing will also be worn.

When they start to play the flute, the cobra will attack without hesitation. At this time, the snake dancer will punish them, just like a dog that is disobedient will be taught a lesson by its owner. Over time, it will form It was a conditioned reflex, but then the cobra heard the sound of the flute again and began to stop attacking because attacking would be punished! But unfortunately, they were wrong, and they would still be punished for not moving. This training mode confused the snakes, and they eventually classified the flute sounds into meaningful and meaningless.