The Neuroscience of Cravings
Research explains why people have intense urges for specific foods — and reveals ways to train our brains to resist them
Serving as an experimental subject in the lab of Peter Hall means eating chocolate or potato chips — as much or as little of either as you want. And there’s no catch.
Well, maybe just a tiny one.
While you’re scarfing down the goodies, you have to wear a device on your head that scrambles some of the signals in your brain with a blast of magnetic energy.
The “transcranial magnetic stimulation” (TMS) headgear is completely safe, and its effects are temporary. When the headgear is turned on, the device alters electrical signals in a region of the brain responsible for self-control, blotting out half of the wearer’s urges to say, eat two pounds of chocolate.
It’s all in the service of advancing science. The science of food cravings, that is. Hall, a PhD psychology researcher at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, is trying to pin down what it is, exactly, that happens in the brain that leaves people vulnerable to cravings. His device is just one tool being used by scientists to pick apart the complex tangle of mental, physical, and environmental factors that can gang up to overwhelm…
