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Your Brain Gets Strangely Good at This When You’re Hungry

Hunger doesn’t just make you want food.

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I can’t help but think of cartoons when it comes to the machinations of the human imagination when a person is hungry. I think of the classic image of two starving guys wandering the desert, and one suddenly sees his buddy as a giant roast turkey just begging for a bite. According to new research out of New Zealand, that gag might not be so far off.

As reported in the journal Appetite, researchers at the University of Otago found that hungry people found it rather quick and easy to imagine vivid mental images of food flavors compared to full people. This means that hunger doesn’t just make you want food, but it sharpens the way your brain imagines the eventual experience of eating it. Hunger so intense that you can practically taste........

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