Brain: it lights up when we see our favorite food

A group of neuroscientists claims there is a family of neurons sensitive to food. They live in the specialized part of us visual cortex. That last one lights up when we see ours favorite food. When we eat our favorite foods, many emotions coexist like euphoria, desire and great anticipation to taste what we like so much. So when we see the food we love, the part of our visual cortex, specialized thanks to the neurons that are sensitive to food, lights up.

Food is central to human social interactions and cultural practices. It’s not just livelihood. Food is central to so many elements of our cultural identity, religious practice, social interactions and many other things people do.

Nancy Kanwisher, professor of cognitive neuroscience

Here, the study focused on how this type of food-sensitive neurons develop. The researchers used a mathematical method allowing them to discover neural populations. These cannot be identified from the fMRI data, therefore the new analytical method is able to obtain the responses of the neural populations.

Four neural populations corresponding to faces, places, bodies and words were identified. However, these were already known, but a fifth population has emerged. It is a food population that experts have defined as: ventral food component (VFC). It is divided into two groups of neurons. The researchers tried simulations that confirmed that VFC is highly selective for food images. The analyzes show that in some subjects the VFC responded slightly better to foods such as pizza compared to apples.