It is vital for man to eat in order to survive, and I believe we all would agree to that statement. In fact, eating is so crucial that our brain employs different regions for food recognition. For fresh, raw foods one region, the occipital cortex, is involved. Another region, the temporal gyrus, is involved for the recognition of processed or cooked foods.
"Food is essential for life. It is therefore of paramount importance that its key characteristics (is it poisonous? is it tasty? is it nutritious?) are readily recognised. To come to our aid, in this case, is our semantic memory, which is a large personal store of information on everything that we know, including the sensorial or abstract properties of the objects. Semantic memory allows us to give a name and a meaning to what we have encountered during our existence" explain Miriam Vignando and Raffaella Rumiati, respectively lead author and research director: "Speaking of food, one of the key characteristics to identify is certainly the level of processing it has undergone".
Via EurekAlert!
(Image Credit: Rachel Park/ Unsplash)