The Neuroscience of Consumption

Why does tasty food or beverage make us hardly stop once we start to eat or drink? Why are the advertisements for food or beverage so effective to induce feeding or drinking? How do we develop our selective food preference? More deeply, how do internal states such as hunger or thirst modulate our perception and influence decision-making? Under this condition, free will never exists. In systems neuroscience, behavior rule is implemented in the dynamic system of brain circuits. Using mice as the model and employing integrative approaches, we are interested in understanding how the brain controls consumption behaviors and how hunger/thirst is integrated into perception at both conscious and subconscious levels.