Eating a food item, pasta for instance, typically leads to the person eating less of that food less for a while. This well studied phenomenon is known as habituation. However, intuitively we believe that imagining a food item increases its desirability and our subsequent consumption. Research has been showing that perception and mental imagery engage similar brain systems and have similar outcomes. This would suggest that imagining a food item would result in habituating to that food item. A team from Carnegie Mellon University set out to experimentally test what would happen.

Reported in the paper “Thought for Food: Imagined Consumption Reduces Actual Consumption” published December 10, 2010 in Science.

The research team carried out a set of five experiments using M&M candies to see if repeated mental simulation of eating the M&Ms alone can result in habituation. Indeed, the results repeatedly showed that when individuals imagined eating 30 M&M candies they ate significantly fewer actual M&Ms than those who imagined eating just 3 candies. Their seems to be little difference between imagined food and real food to to the brain systems involved in habituation.