Media release

From: Society for Neuroscience

Food on the brain

New insights on how the brain differentiates between food and non-food items and how it processes information about food for food-based decisions.

Have you ever wondered how you know not to eat non-food items? Or how you make decisions about what to eat? First author Denise Moerel and others from the University of Sydney in Australia investigated how the brain processes food. They explored how quickly characteristics of food are represented in the brain and the amount of focus required for brain regions to be activated following the presentation of food items by recording from the brains of human participants as they engaged in two tasks. They found that the brain can differentiate between food and non-food items rapidly (approximately 100 milliseconds after item onset) and that neural signals containing information about how natural food is, how much food is transformed or prepared, and perceived caloric content of food occurred more slowly, but still occurred quickly. Information about whether food could be immediately eaten depended on task-relevance and was processed at the slowest rate. This study advances our understanding of how our brains categorize food to make feeding decisions.