Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, UK.
Physiol Behav. 2012 Jun 6;106(3):307-16. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2012.03.023. Epub 2012 Mar 28.
Food ensures our survival and is a potential source of pleasure and general well-being. In order to survive, the human brain is required to optimize the resource allocation such that rewards are pursued when relevant. This means that food intake follows a similar cyclical time course to other rewards with phases related to expectation, consummation and satiety. Here we develop a multilevel model for the full cycle of eating behavior based on the evidence for the brain networks and mechanisms initiating, sustaining and terminating the various phases of eating. We concentrate on how the underlying reward mechanisms of wanting, liking and learning lead to how human food intake is governed by both hedonic and homeostatic principles. We describe five of the main processing principles controlling food intake: hunger and attentional signal processing; motivation-independent discriminative processing; reward representations; learning-dependent multimodal sensory representations and hedonic experience. Overall, the evidence shows that while human food intake is complex, we are making progress in understanding the underlying mechanisms and that the brain networks supporting the food pleasure cycle are remarkably similar to those underlying the processing of other rewards.
食物是我们生存的保障，也是获得愉悦和整体幸福感的潜在来源。为了生存，人类大脑需要优化资源分配，以便在相关时追求奖励。这意味着食物摄入遵循与其他奖励类似的周期性时间过程，其各个阶段与预期、满足和饱腹感有关。在这里，我们基于启动、维持和终止进食各个阶段的大脑网络和机制的证据，为整个进食行为周期建立了一个多层次模型。我们专注于想要、喜欢和学习的潜在奖励机制如何导致人类食物摄入受到享乐和体内平衡原则的共同控制。我们描述了控制食物摄入的五个主要加工原则：饥饿和注意力信号处理；动机独立的辨别性处理；奖励表示；学习依赖性多模态感官表示和享乐体验。总的来说，证据表明，尽管人类的食物摄入很复杂，但我们在理解潜在机制方面正在取得进展，并且支持食物愉悦周期的大脑网络与支持其他奖励处理的网络非常相似。
