It's not just food, it's M&S food ...Remember those ads, evocative were they not? Ever heard anyone describe a particular food as 'orgasmic?' As that first spoon of chocolate mousse is tasted, is it really an 'orgasm?' Is it really the same as a sexual pleasure?

The answer could be yes, and its all to do with a small part of your brain called the Amygdala. There are two of them (amygdalae?) one on each side of the brain, one in each hemisphere, and they differ slightly between men and women. The amygdalae perform primary roles in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events. They are involved in a large array of activities ranging from emotions, phobias, traumatic response, rage, anger, aggression, and most importantly sexuality. In short they store emotional memory. Factual abstract memory and personal episodic memory are taken care of elsewhere, principally in the pre-frontal cortex and the Hippocampus.

The Amygdala are believed to be where we create and hold our emotional discrimination, a belief that has come from laboratory work on many different rats and monkeys, who i am sure would have expressed thier own emotional discrimination at the idea, if they had been asked. Though there have been cases in humans where damage to the amagdala have resulted in profound behavioural changes, known as Klüver-Bucy syndrome named for  The changes most evident are a lack of sexual discrimination, hyper-sexuality and the willingness to eat anything at all.

To the 'food addict' does this all sound like bad news, or 'a damn good reason why I am the way I am'. It all rather depends on what you are looking for, this all could be a handy excuse to pardon behaviour, or it could be taken as a key part in your journey of change. The amygdala produce large quantities of endorphins and various other hormones, and it is possibly through this effect that the person is able to represent the pleasure of the food before it has actually been taken. I have worked with chocolate addicts who, simply by thinking about a specific shade of a purple sweet wrapper, salivate and crave and vividly re-experience the pleasure sensation of a bar of 'Mr Cadbury's finest.' And this is all done with out a single gram of chocolate being in the building.

So, how is this good news for the person who wishes to make lifestyle and health changes when it is merely the representation of the food itself that can induce the state of anticipatory pleasure in the amygdala?

The amygdalae are involved in controlling the effects of emotional arousal on the strength of a memory or an event, as shown by much laboratory testing, most often cited is the work of James McGaugh. If a drug that activates the amygdalae is injected into them, the laboratory animals showed an increased memory for the training in the task. If a drug which lowers the activity of the amygdalae is injected, the animals had impaired memory for the task. Evidence from work with humans indicates that the amygdala plays a similar role. Amygdala activity at the time of creating factual memory correlates with retention for that information. However, this correlation depends on the relative "emotionalness" of the information. More emotionally arousing information increases amygdalar activity, and that activity correlates with retention.

Within the technology of NLP and Hypnotherapy there are several very effective ways to modify the emotional intensity of a memory. The facts remain, the emotional response to those facts change. The purple wraper becomes just a purple wrapper.


It all starts with either an email now; or pick up the phone for a chat.

Richard.Stone@ModernHypnotherapy.co.uk
0208 647 7441