Do you ever find yourself endlessly scrolling through satisfying #yolkporn shots and epic cheese pulls? There might just be a scientific reason for your addiction to images of comfort food.
A recent study by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) neuroscientists has discovered that a specialised part of our visual cortex lights up when we look at images of food. The visual cortex is the part of the brain that processes visual information through our eyes, and it’s here where the cluster of food-sensitive neurons was found. Previous research has shown that this part of the brain is also stimulated by images of faces, places, bodies and words.
But it’s not just any old midweek dinner that makes our brain go crazy. Apparently, pictures of fast food and processed meals, like pizza, elicit a stronger response than raw fruit and vegetables.
The MIT team apparently came across the discovery accidentally, reporting that the neural population could be an adaptation stimulated by humans' evolutionary and cultural need for food.
The researchers examined the brain scans of eight participants as they were shown 10,000 images. They found that pictures of food specifically triggered a population of neurons in the visual cortex.
'We were quite puzzled by this because food is not a visually homogenous category,' said Meenakshi Khosla, one of the lead authors of the study. 'Things like apples and corn and pasta all look so unlike each other, yet we found a single population that responds similarly to all these diverse food items.'
Even when testing to see if this is due to the warmer colours of cooked food, participants were still drawn to cool-toned images of food compared to warm-toned images of non-food items. Black and white images also elicited the same response.
It ‘may be linked to the fact that food is critically important for survival, or due to the fact that it is a core element of our social interactions,' says Khosla.
Still, it’s nice to know there’s a reason why our social feed is mainly people slicing into cakes. Or, is that just us...
In other foodie news, Starbucks has released its Pumpkin Spice Latte for 2022.