Food Porn Makes Our Brains Light Up, According to New Study

Food porn — or images that portray food in a very appetizing or aesthetically appealing way — commonly go viral, but beg the question: Why do so many people derive pleasure from these types of photos we can’t eat? It turns out that it can all be explained with science.

A recent study from MIT found that a specific part of our brains light up whenever we see images of food. The study, which was published Aug. 25 in the science journal “Current Biology,” found that the neurons in the visual frontal cortex (VFC) — the part of the brain that receives, integrates and processes visual information relayed from what we see — also reacts differently depending on the foods we’re looking at.

From researchers’ analysis of brain scans, it was found that some subject’s VFC responded slightly more to processed foods rather than to unprocessed ones.

What does this mean in foodie terms? Seeing a TikTok of a pile of buttermilk breaded chicken fingers deep-fried to perfection or a mountain of glistening, golden waffle fries drizzled with crème fra?che potentially wakes your brain more than an image of kale or broccoli.

This likely means that the brain reacts to different foods the same way we react to people we love and people we don’t so much.

According to findings from MIT researchers, this newly discovered population of food-responsive neurons is located in the ventral visual stream, the part of the brain that processes visual information for the purpose of visual perception. This part of the brain also is responsible for the perception of faces, bodies, places and the words you’re reading right now, a fact that was discovered more than 20 years ago.

This fifth category, food, was a recent discovery, due to advances in reading brain scans and further research into finding out what makes our brains tick. Researchers say that the finding was unexpected and may reflect the special significance of food in human culture.

“Food is central to human social interactions and cultural practices. It’s not just sustenance,” said Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines in a news release. “Food is core to so many elements of our cultural identity, religious practice, and social interactions, and many other things that humans do.”

Researchers said more analysis is needed to pinpoint the significance of this group of neurons and hope to explore how other factors such as the like or dislike of a particular food might affect specific individuals’ responses to that food.

Not all of us like chicken wings, so maybe those neurons will light up differently for vegans, for instance.

They also hope to study if the brain develops these responses during early childhood, what other parts of the brain it communicates with and if other animals, like primates, react in the same way.

An Instagram-worthy milkshake, topped with crumbled Oreo cookies, swirls of whipped cream, a decadent cube of brownie, oozing hot fudge and the reddest maraschino cherry you’ve ever seen may be a microcosm of excess, but also it's food for thought.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com