Can your brain test the difference? How neurosciences are revolutionizing the way we think about food and wine

with Mario Ubiali & Andrea Bariselli

Food quality and its impact on human beings, both in terms of health and well-being, are well documented by a number of studies, ranging from pure science to social sciences and anthropology.

What can neuroscience add to our current body of knowledge? Thanks to an unprecedented ability to collect data in real-life scenarios, such as during daily consumption of food and wine, neuroscience offers deeply innovative insights on how our brain is influenced by the quality of what we eat and drink. In this Open Conference, Thimus will introduce basic notions on neuroscience and the tools it utilizes to collect data, with specific reference to food and wine experiences.

A number of case histories will be presented to illustrate how the brain responds to different stimuli, including groundbreaking data presented at the recent Slow Food Nations Festival in Denver, USA. Data collected on cheese, wine, honey, bread will be illustrated in reference to some key questions: Can the brain detect differences between organic and chemically-intensive products? How much does education and information influence consumer response to food and wine? How are good or bad reward mechanisms built in the brain during specific food experiences and how much of that is connected to the chemistry of food? A live demonstration on a volunteer will be performed at the end of the conference to show how the experiment is setup and data collection performed.