Summary: A new study reports altering activity in the amygdala can eliminate cravings for sweet foods. Researchers believe the findings could help develop new treatments for eating disorders.
Source: Zuckerman Institute.
New research in mice has revealed that the brain’s underlying desire for sweet, and its distaste for bitter, can be erased by manipulating neurons in the amygdala, the emotion center of the brain.
The study showed that removing an animal’s capacity to crave or despise a taste had no impact on its ability to identify it. The findings suggest that the brain’s complex taste system — which produces an array of thoughts, memories and emotions when tasting food — are actually discrete units that can be individually isolated, modified or removed all together. The research points to new strategies for understanding and treating eating disorders including obesity and anorexia nervosa.
The research was published today in Nature.
“When our brain senses a taste it not only identifies its quality, it choreographs a wonderful symphony of neuronal signals that link that experience to its context, hedonic value, memories, emotions and the other senses, to produce a coherent response,” said Charles S. Zuker, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and the paper’s senior author.
Today’s study builds upon earlier work by Dr. Zuker and his team to map the brain’s taste system. Previously, the researchers revealed that when the tongue encounters one of the five tastes — sweet, bitter, salty, sour or umami — specialized cells on the tongue send signals to specialized regions of the brain so as to identify the taste, and trigger the appropriate actions and behaviors.
To shed light on that experience, the scientists focused on sweet and bitter taste and the amygdala, a brain region known to be important for making value judgments about sensory information. Previous research by Dr. Zuker, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of neuroscience and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and others showed that the amygdala connects directly to the taste cortex.
“Our earlier work revealed a clear divide between the sweet and bitter regions of the taste cortex,” said Li Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral research scientist in the Zuker lab and the paper’s first author. “This new study showed that same division continued all the way into the amygdala. This segregation between sweet and bitter regions in both the taste cortex and amygdala meant we could independently manipulate these brain regions and monitor any resulting changes in behavior.”
The scientists performed several experiments in which the sweet or bitter connections to the amygdala were artificially switched on, like flicking a series of light switches. When the sweet connections were turned on, the animals responded to water just as if it were sugar. And by manipulating the same types of connections, the researchers could even change the perceived quality of a taste, turning sweet into an aversive taste, or bitter into an attractive one.
In contrast, when the researchers instead turned off the amygdala connections but left the taste cortex untouched, the mice could still recognize and distinguish sweet from bitter, but now lacked the basic emotional reactions, like preference for sugar or aversion to bitter.
“It would be like taking a bite of your favorite chocolate cake but not deriving any enjoyment from doing so,” said Dr. Wang. “After a few bites, you may stop eating, whereas otherwise you would have scarfed it down.”
Usually, the identity of a food and the pleasure one feels when eating it are intertwined. But the researchers showed that these components can be isolated from each other, and then manipulated separately. This suggests that the amygdala could be a promising area of focus when looking for strategies to treat eating disorders.
In the immediate future, Drs. Zuker and Wang are investigating additional brain regions that serve critical roles in the taste system. For example, the taste cortex also links directly to regions involved in motor actions, learning and memory.
“Our goal is to piece together how those regions add meaning and context to taste,” said Dr. Wang. “We hope our investigations will help to decipher how the brain processes sensory information and brings richness to our sensory experiences.”
Funding: This research was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA035025), the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH082017) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The authors report no financial or other conflicts of interest.
Source: Anne Holden – Zuckerman Institute
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Li Wang/Zuker Lab/Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute.
Original Research: Abstract for “The coding of valence and identity in the mammalian taste system” by Li Wang, Sarah Gillis-Smith, Yueqing Peng, Juen Zhang, Xiaoke Chen, C. Daniel Salzman, Nicholas J. P. Ryba & Charles S. Zuker in Nature. Published May 30 2018.
doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0165-4
[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]Zuckerman Institute “Switching Off Cravings and Food Pleasure in the Brain: Mouse Study.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 30 May 2018.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/cravings-food-pleasure-9183/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]Zuckerman Institute (2018, May 30). Switching Off Cravings and Food Pleasure in the Brain: Mouse Study. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved May 30, 2018 from https://neurosciencenews.com/cravings-food-pleasure-9183/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]Zuckerman Institute “Switching Off Cravings and Food Pleasure in the Brain: Mouse Study.” https://neurosciencenews.com/cravings-food-pleasure-9183/ (accessed May 30, 2018).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]
Abstract
The coding of valence and identity in the mammalian taste system
The ability of the taste system to identify a tastant (what it tastes like) enables animals to recognize and discriminate between the different basic taste qualities1,2. The valence of a tastant (whether it is appetitive or aversive) specifies its hedonic value and elicits the execution of selective behaviours. Here we examine how sweet and bitter are afforded valence versus identity in mice. We show that neurons in the sweet-responsive and bitter-responsive cortex project to topographically distinct areas of the amygdala, with strong segregation of neural projections conveying appetitive versus aversive taste signals. By manipulating selective taste inputs to the amygdala, we show that it is possible to impose positive or negative valence on a neutral water stimulus, and even to reverse the hedonic value of a sweet or bitter tastant. Remarkably, mice with silenced neurons in the amygdala no longer exhibit behaviour that reflects the valence associated with direct stimulation of the taste cortex, or with delivery of sweet and bitter chemicals. Nonetheless, these mice can still identify and discriminate between tastants, just as wild-type controls do. These results help to explain how the taste system generates stereotypic and predetermined attractive and aversive taste behaviours, and support the existence of distinct neural substrates for the discrimination of taste identity and the assignment of valence.
