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FOOD VALUATION

Breaking down a meal

Nature Neuroscience volume 20, pages 1659–1660 (2017)Cite this article

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To decide how much we would like to eat a food item, our brain automatically decomposes it into constituent nutrients. The quantities of the different nutrients are represented in distinct parts of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and then integrated by the medial orbitofrontal cortex to provide a global value judgment.

How do we know what is good for us? Natural selection may have equipped our brains with a judgment device that assigns values to potential courses of actions, depending on their anticipated outcomes. Values can be seen as distant proxies for reproductive success: we should favor action policies that are more likely, in the end, to disseminate our genes. To take common examples, we should look for rich food that guarantees our survival, for healthy partners who ensure numerous progeny, and for social positions that facilitate access to the two former primary goals. In the last decade, cognitive neuroscience research in humans has identified neural representations of value, whose key node is a region situated between the eye sockets called the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC)1,2,3. The function of the mOFC, therefore, would be to provide value judgments, which we may feel as desires and which may ground arbitration between potential action policies.

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Fig. 1: How the brain transforms perception of food items into willingness to pay.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Motivation Brain & Behavior (MBB) team, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM), Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France

    Mathias Pessiglione & Antonius Wiehler

  2. Inserm Unit 1127, CNRS Unit 7225, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC-Paris 6), Paris, France

    Mathias Pessiglione & Antonius Wiehler

Authors
  1. Mathias Pessiglione
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  2. Antonius Wiehler
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Correspondence to Mathias Pessiglione.

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Pessiglione, M., Wiehler, A. Breaking down a meal. Nat Neurosci 20, 1659–1660 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-017-0016-x

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