‘Food porn’: How our brain reacts to photos of delicious food, according to science

You might already roll your eyes in glee or even let out a groan at the restaurant table (perhaps without Meg Ryan’s talent) when the waiter brings your next plate of food. Science, at least, will be on your side.

A new study by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has proven that the idea of ​​”food porn” is real, not just a hashtag. That is, there is a new constellation of image processing neurons identified by experts that are stimulated exclusively by food images.

These neurons activated by food images (and hitherto unknown) are located in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes and interprets the stimuli sent by the eyes, alongside others that respond specifically to faces, bodies, places or words, for example. example — these previously mapped.

The discovery helps us understand the special significance of food in human culture, the researchers say. This is because food is not only critically important for survival, but occupies a fundamental sense in the way we organize our social life.

“Food is central to human social interactions and cultural practices. It’s not just sustenance,” comments on the study Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT and one of the pioneers in the studies of ventral visual flow neurons — she was the one who discovered , for two decades, cortical regions that respond selectively to faces.

“Food is essential for many elements of our cultural identity, religious practice and social interactions (…). Interesting that we have neurons that are especially stimulated by food.”

The recent findings came to light from an analysis of a large public database of human brain responses to a set of 10,000 images that MIT postdoctoral fellow Meenakshi Khosla, the paper’s lead author, and his colleague and researcher , N. Apurva Ratan Murty, were doing.

From pizza to apples

The data, from a mathematical method, were captured through functional whole-brain magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of eight people while viewing thousands of images.

The objective was to try to understand if the main selectivities of visual stimuli (faces, places, words, etc.) were confirmed or if there could be some that previous studies had not identified.

Potato: it was only necessary to analyze the images to realize that the food stimulated a new population of neurons that had not been studied until then. “We were quite intrigued by this because food is not a visually homogeneous category,” says Khosla, in a paper published by MIT.

“Things like apples, corn and pasta look so different from each other, but we found a single population [de neurônios] that responds similarly to all of these diverse food items.”

That is, when identifying something as “edible”, specific neurons in our brain are activated. To make it clear that these neurons actually responded to food, not just the shape of it, the scientists used similarly shaped images, such as a banana and the yellow crescent moon, or even photos of a chihuahua next to muffins — an idea that, according to Khosla, it came from a meme that went viral on social media.

“While most of the top rated images are of prepared foods (eg a slice of pizza), fresh foods (eg broccoli, carrots, bananas etc.) study.

This means that a slice of pizza with melted cheese hits neurons differently and more potently than raw fruits or vegetables. Photos with “warmer, more saturated colors, higher curvature, and a complex spatial structure with rich texture” had the most responses, the publication states.

It could be evidence, for example, of why photos of eggs with soft yolks, melted chocolate, or even a generous serving of tomato sauce over pasta can generate more engagement than photos of the food appearing before it is processed.

‘Food porn’ and the networks

Although coined in 1984 by the feminist critic Rosalind Coward, in her book “Female Desire”, the expression “food porn” was even spread with the advent of social networks, specifically Instagram, in which photos of sumptuous and hedonistic foods bringing drips, textures , broths and sauces became extremely popular, leading to the viralization of the hashtag #foodporn (currently with more than 290 million posts on the platform).

In films and television series, the artifice of making “pornographic close-ups” to whet the appetite and hold the viewer’s attention started to be used more after the documentary “O Sushi dos Sonhos de Jiro”, released in 2011.

In the film, expansive cinematography “emphasizes long, almost sensual takes as chefs cut a red tuna and massage an octopus until it’s perfectly tender,” as the Eater recently reported.

Jiro’s director later perfected the technique: David Gelb is responsible for the success of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, which shows chefs from around the world cooking in front of cameras so precise and with such resolution that they could be filming the feathers of a bird or the texture of an insect’s wing in these nature shows — an inspiration from him, by the way.

Today, aesthetics “food porn” has become quite widespread and even habitual, but it is almost impossible to think about the food we see on screens (on television, but also on cell phones) without the porn that has accompanied it for so long.

Back to the study, the researchers want to detail which foods and what kind of images can have even more response in our brain, inducing these arbitrary stimuli through the predictive model and many more images. In the future, they hope to explore how factors such as familiarity with a food and liking or disliking a particular food might affect responses.

They know that there is a ventral food component (HRV) in our brains, spread across two clusters of neurons, which respond to the slightest stimulus from a food in front of us.

Whether the amount of recipe photos we see every day on multiple screens has contributed to improving them remains to be seen. But there is no longer any doubt that a picture of pizza can ignite dormant neurons within us.

This text was originally published here.