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Thoughts of food seem to consume us, weighing heavily on our minds. We hungrily scan the headlines, seeking ways to battle excess pounds. We devour diet advice, to little avail. Despite our good intentions, obesity rates keep climbing. Why is it so hard to stop overeating? “When our stomach begins to growl, too often it drowns out any good advice coming from our brain,” writes psychiatrist Oliver Grimm in his article “Addicted to Food?” Any person may have difficulty with restraint at times, as Grimm explains. For binge eaters, the problem intensifies; the brain's reward system can go haywire. In neurobiological terms, binge eating is not dissimilar to drug addiction. Turn to page 36 for details.
At the other end of the food-behavior scale, a person who has, in effect, too much control over what he or she ingests can suffer from self-imposed starvation. People afflicted with disorders such as anorexia eat too little because their distorted mental image of their body looks larger than reality, explain Christian Eggers and Verena Liebers in “Through a Glass, Darkly,” which starts on page 30. To return to normal weight, anorexics must learn to adjust their flawed perceptions.
We typically judge “vegetative” patients, who are unresponsive, as being mentally incapable. Are our perceptions misleading us again? In “Freeing a Locked-In Mind,” beginning on page 40, staff editor Karen Schrock tells how brain-imaging studies have revealed that some of these patients are, in fact, aware but unable to command their useless body to react. The exciting finding offers hope that we may soon be able to reach at least a number of the 250,000 Americans who have consciousness disorders. In this issue and others, Scientific American Mind documents science's efforts to burst such mental shackles—whether behavioral or biological in nature. Stay tuned.
