ABSTRACT
This chapter describes higher levels of the brain that organize feeding in relation to the environment, and that give rise to conscious thoughts and feelings about food. Activating neurons or axons in a specific part of the brain was limited to passing electric current through a small electrode or delivering a small amount of a chemical ligand to that region. Injections into the cortical coldspots revealed a circuit linking coldspots in other brain regions. In rodents, the olfactory bulbs are large structures relative to the brain, but in humans they are quite small appendages lying beneath the very large frontal cortex. Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a technique for “looking inside” the working human brain. A single scan or series of scans records from many brain regions simultaneously. However, both the spatial and temporal resolutions of the method introduce some serious assumptions.
