Scientists find ‘food neurons’ in the brain

According to a Russian researcher, this should not be considered a “breakthrough” in cognitive science.

When we look at a cake, a watermelon or a fried chicken, in our brain, in its temporal cortex, a certain group of neurons is activated. Its exact location was determined by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).

Over 30 years, different groups of researchers have found groups of neurons in the brain that “turn on” when a person recognizes a familiar face, body, word or place, according to the journal Current Biology. Now brain cells have been found that “recognize” food. The researchers arrived at this by processing the brain responses of eight people in more than 10,000 images. The subjects’ brains were studied using functional MRI, paying attention to the work of the so-called ventral visual pathway, which connects neurons in the visual zone with the temporal lobe of the brain responsible for object recognition.

Thanks to improved equipment, which now allows you to take pictures with higher spatial resolution, scientists were able to see what was previously hidden from them. They developed an algorithm that allows them to distinguish between the reactions of individual neuronal populations in each voxel (a section of brain tissue corresponding to a 1x1x1 mm cube). And this is despite the fact that in each such voxel, scientists see hundreds of thousands of different neurons! First, the researchers confirmed that four known groups of neurons could be identified with this method. Then a fifth group was discovered, which became more active when a person was shown pictures of food.

In the course of the study, it turned out that in some participants in the experiment, the “edible” group of neurons is highly selective in relation to pictures that depict cooked dishes, and not raw foods from which they are prepared.

The authors of the work note that the next step in their work will be the study of similar brain reactions in early childhood. It will also be interesting to understand whether there is a similar system for recognizing types of food in animals.

Comment by Irina MASULIS, Deputy Director for Research at the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

– This article is an example of how new knowledge is generated based on Big Data accumulated in Internet databases. I wouldn’t really call this a “breakthrough” in cognitive science, as many people interpret it. The study under discussion is primarily based on the database of results of fMRI scanning of the brain in various states and upon presentation of stimuli of various nature, created in the United States, unprecedented in terms of the amount of information. The merit of the author of the work Nancy Kanwisher and her co-authors is the development of mathematical algorithms for the analysis of MRI signals. Using the patient groups already included in the database, they “tricked out” using mathematical methods to obtain the most detailed picture of the distribution of activity in volumetric cortical zones to date. Mathematically, it looks like huge matrices of distribution of signals by intensity, where each signal has its own “cell” in the cerebral cortex.