Dana Small, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Medical School, and colleagues found that different brain regions were activated selectively depending on whether subjects were eating chocolate when they were highly motivated to eat and rated the chocolate as "very pleasant" or whether they ate chocolate despite being satiated.
Small explained that studying the brain’s response to eating a highly rewarding food such as chocolate provides an effective "in-health" model of addiction. "The problem with studying addicts to understand addiction is that we don’t know what their brains were like before the addiction and we therefore can’t determine which brain functions have changed," Small said.
Small also noted that measuring brain responses in normal individuals who ate beyond satiety provided a measure against which the brain response to overeating in many people with eating disorders can be compared and thus serve as the basis for new research on eating disorders.
Small is a researcher in the Cognitive Brain Mapping Group at Northwestern University Medical School. Collaborating on this study were Robert J. Zatorre, Alain Dagher, Alan C. Evans and Marilyn Jones-Gotman, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
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