Whenever you see mutton skewers grilled to perfection, cream cakes decorated with fruits, or ice cream cones on hot days, are you unable to resist the urge to eat?
When this kind of delicacies appear in our sight, not only will our saliva be secreted, scientists from MIT have discovered that a place in your brain even "lights up."
Image source: 123RF
This special location is located in the ventral visual stream of the visual cortex. Scientists newly discovered the group of neurons that become active when we see delicious food . At the same time, this group of neurons Neurons surrounding the cells can respond specifically to faces, bodies, locations and text. The researchers pointed out that this shows that food plays an important role in human society and culture.
"For humans, food is not just about satisfying appetite but also part of social and cultural interactions," said Nancy Kanwisher, professor of neuroscience at MIT.
In the past 20 years of work, when Professor Kanwisher studied the ventral visual stream, she discovered areas that responded specifically to facial recognition. Subsequently, she and her colleagues found areas that responded to body, text and other information.
In a new study published in Current Biology, Professor Kanwisher's team once again analyzed a huge data set containing data from whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging of 8 volunteers while observing thousands of pictures. .
What they had to do was to find groups of neurons that responded specifically to visual information input. With the help of a mathematical method used in the analysis of the auditory cortex, they confirmed 4 independent small groups in the visual cortex , respectively. Corresponds to previously identified faces, locations, bodies, and text information.
Only this time, a fifth neuron population emerged, They seemed to be extra interested in pictures of food. "This is very surprising because different foods are not visually homogeneous. , apple, and pasta look completely different, but this group of neurons responds similarly to them." Professor Kanwisher explained.
▲ Some responses of specific brain areas when volunteers saw different pictures (Picture source: Reference [2])
They called this group of neurons the ventral food component (VFC), based on previous Data, the researcher specially trained a computational model that simulates VFC. The researcher may provide the model with very similar pictures, such as yellow bananas and light yellow crescent .
What is certain is that the VFC model can distinguish food from non-food well, and they will respond more to food stimuli. By analyzing the fMRI data of volunteers, researchers found that some people also differentiate between food types. For example, their VFC responds more to processed foods such as pizza than to unprocessed foods such as apples.
In the future, they want to further confirm the changes in VFC during childhood and adulthood, and understand which brain areas it is closely connected with. In addition, do monkeys without food culture also have VFC? This is also a problem that they are very interested in and want to solve.
Reference:
[1] Meenakshi Khosla, A Highly Selective Response to Food in Human Visual Cortex Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.009.
[2 ] Scientists have discovered a population of neurons that light up whenever we see images of food. Retrieved August 30, 2022 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-scientists-population-neurons-images-food.html
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