A new study shows that what's going on inside our head affects our senses earlier than previously believed.
Boat. Apple. Pencil.
Phone. Which of these words pops out at you the most?
If your instant answer
was “apple,” that might say more about your stomach than your vocabulary.
This is because hungry
people see food-related words more clearly, according to new research published
in the journal Psychological Science, a journal of the Association
for Psychological Science. In the study, 42 normal-weight students at the
University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis in France were told to arrive at the
psychology lab after three or four hours of not eating. Half were told to come back in 10 minutes, and half
were told to take an hour for lunch and then come back. For the experiment,
participants looked at a computer screen where 80 words were individually
flashed for 1/300th of a second, which is too short of a time for the
participants to read the words. After each word, the person was asked to rate
how bright the word appeared, as well as whether they saw a food-related word,
such as cake, or a neutral word, such as boat.
Hungry people thought
the food-related words were brighter and clearer than neutral words, and they
were better at identifying words as food related, as compared to the students
who had lunch shortly before the experiment. Researchers say that this comes
down to a difference in perception rooted in hunger.
Scientists have long
known that what’s going on inside our head affects our senses. For example, in
the past psychologists have shown that poorer children perceive coins to be
larger than they really are, and hungry people think pictures of food are
brighter. However, this new data is the first to show that what our body is
feeling impacts our senses at the earliest, perceptual stage, not later on when
the brain’s higher-level thinking processes are involved.
"This is
something great to me, that humans can really perceive what they need or what
they strive for, to know that our brain can really be at the disposal of our
motives and needs," said lead researcher Rémi Radel in a release.
"There is something inside us that selects information in the world to
make life easier."