In a computer model, specific regions of the visual cortex of the occipital lobe respond
“We eat with our eyes first.”
This saying, said by the ancient Roman gourmet Marcus Gabius Apicius in the 1st century, was proven to be scientific fact 2,000 years later. Based on the research papers of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers published in Current Biology, the health medicine portal ‘WebMD’ reported on the 26th (local time).
Researchers have found that when we look at food, a previously unknown area of the brain is activated. Called the ‘ventral food element’, this region is located in the brain’s occipital visual cortex, which is known to play a role in recognizing faces, scenes and words.
The researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) technology to create a computer model of this part. It is a methodology introduced in many areas of research to simulate and study the complex systems of the body. Recently, a computer model of the digestive system has been used to find the optimal absorption site when a pill is taken.
Manakshi Kosla, a researcher at MIT’s McGovern Brain Research Center, who is the first author of the paper, said, “This study is a study that applies cutting-edge technology. More research is needed to understand how it is regulated by Mae’ n explain that identifying those differences could help people find out how to choose what to eat and what causes eating disorders.
Rather than proving or disproving definitive hypotheses, the researchers set out to examine the data in a ‘hypothesis neutral’ approach to see what they could find. Their goal was to go beyond the limits of some theories that previous researchers had already thought to test. To do this, they analyzed a public database called the Natural Scene Dataset, which scanned the brains of eight volunteers exposed to 56,720 images.
Software that analyzed the data identified areas of the brain that were activated when it encountered images of faces, bodies, words and scenes. Most of them were already known areas. But surprisingly, there appears to be an unknown area of the brain that only responds to images of food. The researchers’ first reaction when they saw this was, “It’s cute, but it can’t be true,” Kosla said.
To test this again, the researchers showed more than 1.2 million new images in a computer brain model. The area responded to images of food only. Color didn’t matter. Although smaller than the color image, the area showed a reaction to the black-and-white image as well. He also distinguished between food and food-like objects. For example, he distinguished between a banana and a crescent moon, a blueberry muffin and a muffin-shaped dog’s head.
When applied to humans, it has also been observed that people respond slightly more to processed foods such as pizza than to unprocessed foods such as apples. Based on this, the researchers plan to continue studying how things like preferences for certain foods affect the response to food.
The computer model technology can be applied to other research areas as well. The technology could also be used to examine how the brain responds to social cues such as gestures and facial expressions, Kosla said. He said he has already started scanning the brains of new volunteers to test whether real people’s brains respond like computer models.
The paper is available at the following link ( https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01286-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com %2Fretrieve) %2Fpii%2FS0960982222012866%3Fshowall%3Dtrue).
