WARNING!!
Eat something prior to reading this post!!
We’ve all heard not to go to the grocery store while on an empty stomach, but now…
I read an interesting article this weekend in the Science Daily, When Our Eyes Serve Our Stomach, the article reported the finding of a new study, that stated that hungry people see food-related words more clearly than people who’ve just eaten. This was a study published in Psychological Science.
The study was conducted at University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France and consisted of 42 students with a normal body mass index. On the day of his or her test, each student was told to arrive at the lab at noon after three or four hours of not eating. Then they were told there was a delay. Some were told to come back in 10 minutes; others were given an hour to get lunch first. So half the students were hungry when they did the experiment and the other half had just eaten.
For the experiment, the participant looked at a computer screen. One by one, 80 words flashed on the screen for about 1/300th of a second each (too brief for the participant to really read it), at a size that was just at the threshold of what that person could consciously perceive. A quarter of the words were food-related. After each word, the person was asked how bright the word was and asked to choose which of two words they’d seen — a food-related word like cake or a neutral word like boat. Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying food-related words.
This article was extremely interesting to me, to see the connection on how the eyes, mind, and stomach work together. We truly are wondrously made creatures!
Happy Monday!
