Free Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream by Jennifer Ackerman

five hours later, it's getting harder to attend to the matter at hand as your thoughts turn inexorably to the sushi buffet at your favorite Japanese restaurant or the hearty ham sandwich stashed in your lunchbox. The fifteenth-century Venetian surgeon Alessandro Benedetti asserted that nature had relegated the stomach to a site distant from the brain, fencing it off with the diaphragm, "in order not to disturb the rational part of the mind with its importunity." Nature, it would seem, failed in its mission.
    What does the mind look like while pondering unagi or honey-baked ham? Where does the craving originate, in the belly or the brain? One would assume clues could be found in people who think incessantly of food. Not long ago, two Swiss researchers, neuropsychologist Marianne Regard and neurologist Theodor Landis, conducted a brain imaging study of such people, a group of patients afflicted with a benign eating disorder the scientists termed gourmand syndrome.
    The syndrome was first identified by the team in two patients who developed obsessions with food after suffering stroke damage to their right frontal lobes. Before their illnesses, both patients had been average eaters with no particular food preferences. After his stroke, one patient could think of nothing but tasty food served in a fine restaurant. "It is time for a real hearty dinner," he wrote in his hospital diary, "a good sausage with hash browns or some spaghetti Bolognese, or risotto and a breaded cutlet, nicely decorated, or a scallop of game in cream sauce with 'Spätzle' (a swiss and southern german specialty). Always just eat and drink!" The second patient experienced similar cravings and a yen for food shopping, cooking, and selecting restaurants. He also got a thrill out of recounting special meals: "The creamy pastry slips from the foil, like a mermaid," he wrote. "I take a bite. From now on, it will be more difficult to put me under stress."
    To follow up on their observations, the Swiss researchers scanned the brains of thirty-six other passionate eaters and discovered that thirty-four of them had lesions in their right frontal lobes. The scientists were quick to say that their findings do not point to this right-hand corner of the brain as a food-contemplation area, but rather an area possibly involved in impulse control and obsessions of all sorts.
    Still, I found the mania curiously familiar and wondered whether it's possible to experience this sort of frontal-lobe activity in varying degrees. I admit to more than a smidgeon of the syndrome myself, a tendency to think too often of food and to remember meals in inordinate detail: the artichokes stuffed with shrimp served on a deck in Fresno, the fried catfish dished up with collard greens in a juke joint in the Delta, a root beer float gratefully inhaled on a lakeshore at my first sleep-away camp. (Letters home from this camp were a litany of complaints about the food, save one: "I may seem happy in this letter but it's only because we had French toast this morning.")
    My husband once ate a meal in Julia Child's kitchen and can recall only that he was served "some sort of chicken"—a failure of culinary consciousness I simply can't fathom.
    The sort of intense preoccupation with food suffered (or enjoyed) by people with gourmand syndrome may lie at the extreme end of the scale, but all of us fixate on food when we haven't had it for a while. Scientists probing the normal species of hunger have recently zeroed in on centers in the brain devoted to its control.
     
     
    Don Quixote called hunger " la mejor salsa del mundo, " the world's best sauce. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "that uneasy or painful sensation caused by the want of food." Hunger often involves an aching or growling stomach, but it can also elicit weakness, dry mouth, and—sorry, Dottore Benedetti—headaches and loss of concentration. Hunger pangs peak at midday, even in the absence of external time cues. (A pang,