Human brain: Special food neurons discovered

His scientists MIT University of USA announced that they had discovered a population strokes neurons that are activated whenever we see images of food alone. The image of a pizza, an ice cream or a steak activates a specialized part of the brain’s visual cortex.

The researchers, led by cognitive neuroscience professor Nancy Kanwisher and computational neuroscientist Minaxi Khosla, who published in the journal Current Biology, studied brain responses to 10,000 images obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They thus identified in the visual cortex four separate already known groups of neurons that respond to faces, locations, bodies and words, as well as a fifth hitherto unknown group that selectively reacts to images of food.

“Initially we were concerned because food is not a visually homogeneous category. Things like apples and pasta are very dissimilar, yet we found a population of neurons that responded similarly to the most diverse types of food.”said Dr. Khosla.

Future studies will investigate whether people’s brain responses differ according to their dietary preferences. Already, based on early indications, many people’s brains react slightly more to cooked foods like pizza than to fruit.

Source: News Beast

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