You're trying to decide what to eat for dinner. Should it be the chicken and broccoli? The super-sized fast-food burger? Skip it entirely and just get some Rocky Road?
Making that choice, it turns out, is a complex neurological exercise. But, according to researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), it's one that can be influenced by a simple shifting of attention toward the healthy side of life. And that shift may provide strategies to help us all make healthier choices — not just in terms of the foods we eat, but in other areas, like whether or not we pick up a cigarette. http://venitism.blogspot.com
When you decide what to eat, not only does your brain need to figure out how it feels about a food's taste versus its health benefits versus its size or even its packaging, but it needs to decide the importance of each of those attributes relative to the others. And it needs to do all of this more-or-less instantaneously.
Antonio Rangelof Caltech, has been studying this value-deriving and decision-making process for years now. Rangelof has described differences in the brains of people who are better at exercising self-control than others. What he found was that while everyone uses the same area of the brain — the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC — to make value-laden decisions like what to munch on, there's a second brain area — the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or dlPFC — that seems to come to life when a person is using self-control during the decision-making process.
In other words, when the dlPFC is active, it allows the vmPFC to take into account health benefits as well as taste when it assigns a value to a particular food. http://venitism.blogspot.com
The new study goes a step further, showing there seem to be ways to help kickstart the dlPFC through the use of external cues that allow us to exhibit more self-control than we might have otherwise.
The increased influence of the health signals on the vmPFC results in an overall value for the food that is based more on its health properties than is the case when the subject's attention is not focused on healthiness.
These results are not limited just to choices about food. These findings are also relevant to the current changes to cigarette warnings many governments have started to make. These changes include adding graphical images of the health risks of smoking. It remains to be seen whether these images will be more effective in drawing attention to the unhealthiness of smoking than the text warnings. If the graphical warnings do increase attention to health, then these results suggest that they could decrease the desire to smoke.
http://venitism.blogspot.com
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