Posts tagged eating
NeuroLove
Loving Neuroscience comes from understanding
![What all goes into how you taste food?
Well, you use a lot of senses to process food. You see the food, smell the food (orthonasally before you eat it and retronasally to give you flavor), feel the food (there are touch receptors on the tongue) and then of course, there is taste itself. This means, you use visual cortices to see your food, olfactory cortex to smell it (orbitofrontal cortices, insula for flavor), taste in temporal lobe/insula, and feel it in the somatosensory cortices.
All of these senses have their own locations for being processed in the brain (see the image above). The one problem with this image is that yes, taste is processed in the insula, but the insula is not located where it is marked (I assume they put it there just so they could show it easily, since the insula would be in front of/behind and just below the corpus callosum). And a few other of these locations do not look entirely anatomically accurate, but it is an artistic rendering. But- ignoring the anatomical inaccuracies, the information is correct (and I couldn’t find a better one with all the information online).
Anyway, think about how much of your brain works to enjoy your food the next time you are eating- it is pretty astounding.
[Image Source- Gordon Shepherd’s Neurogastronomy, taken from Culinate]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7447wEIhc1qb6etto1_400.jpg)
What all goes into how you taste food?
Well, you use a lot of senses to process food. You see the food, smell the food (orthonasally before you eat it and retronasally to give you flavor), feel the food (there are touch receptors on the tongue) and then of course, there is taste itself. This means, you use visual cortices to see your food, olfactory cortex to smell it (orbitofrontal cortices, insula for flavor), taste in temporal lobe/insula, and feel it in the somatosensory cortices.
All of these senses have their own locations for being processed in the brain (see the image above). The one problem with this image is that yes, taste is processed in the insula, but the insula is not located where it is marked (I assume they put it there just so they could show it easily, since the insula would be in front of/behind and just below the corpus callosum). And a few other of these locations do not look entirely anatomically accurate, but it is an artistic rendering. But- ignoring the anatomical inaccuracies, the information is correct (and I couldn’t find a better one with all the information online).
Anyway, think about how much of your brain works to enjoy your food the next time you are eating- it is pretty astounding.
[Image Source- Gordon Shepherd’s Neurogastronomy, taken from Culinate]
