Special food neurons discovered in the human brain

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The image of a pizza, an ice cream or a steak activates a specialized part of the brain’s visual cortex.

Scientists at MIT University in the US announced that they discovered a population brain neurons which activate whenever we see food pictures only. 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 respond 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.

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