Chocolate … it has been called ’emotional food’ and it is a pleasure for many and even an addiction for some … But, can we know who will end up eating a piece of this delicacy after having seen, smelled and touched it for a while ? According to Astrid Frankort, from the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Maastricht University, and her collaborators, we can know who will gain and who will lose weight based on their brain responses to hypercaloric food … and yet we know little about how those activity patterns brain can predict who will eat and who will not at a specific time.
To learn a little better how we behave when faced with food, this team of researchers carried out an experiment in which the objective was to analyze which brain areas are related to the consumption of chocolate after having been exposed to it and if the brain activity kept any related to the ‘craving’ or desire to eat.
The results, published recently in the scientific journal Appetite (2015), showed that eating chocolate after seeing it was related to the activity of different brain areas. More specifically, the probability of eating a piece of chocolate was greater the more the right caudate nucleus and the left frontopolar cortex were activated, two areas associated with reward , and also when two other areas more related to the reward were activated less intensely. cognitive control such as the left dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal areas.
In addition, the authors found another interesting finding: the act of eating chocolate was predicted more reliably through brain activity than from what the participants said about their desire or desire to do so. Come on, if we have to trust something when it comes to knowing how much one wants to eat a chocolate, it is better to do it with their brain than what they tell us.
These discoveries help to understand why some people find it so difficult to resist the temptation of chocolate, which is that it can be very difficult to deprive the brain of a reward as powerful as a delicious bonbon.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
