Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Why Hunger and Loneliness Activate the Same Part of the Brain


Tomova used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to see how participants' brains responded to images of drool-worthy food and social gatherings.

 Livia Tomova, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her collaborators conducted a study in which they had a test group of 40 people fast for ten hours.
 At the end of the day, the hungry subjects were shown images of pizza and chocolate cake while receiving a brain scan, reports Bethany Brookshire for Science News.
 In a second round of experimentation, the subjects were barred from social interaction—no in person or virtual human contact—for ten hours. Afterward, they were shown images of people gathering and playing sports as the team scanned their brains. 
The scans revealed that the same part of their brains perked up in response to both food and social gatherings, reports Science News. 

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