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When Our Eyes Serve Our Stomach Our senses aren’t just delivering a strict view of what’s going on in the world；they’re affected by what’s going on in our heads1. A new study finds that hungry people see food-related words more clearly than people who’ve just eaten. Psychologists have known for decades that what’s going on inside our head affects our senses． For example, poorer children think coins are larger than they are, and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter．Rémi Radel of University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis2, France, wanted to investigate how this happens．Does it happen right away as the brain receives signals from the eyes or a little later as the brain’s high-1evel thinking processes get involved. Radel recruited 42 students with a normal body mass index3．On the day of his or her test, each student was told to arrive at the lab at noon after three or four hours of not eating. Then they were told there was a delay. Some were told to come back in 10 minutes; others were given an hour to get lunch first. So half the students were hungry when they did the experiment and the other half had just eaten. For the experiment, the participant looked at a computer screen．One by one, 80 words flashed on the screen for about l/300th of a second each. They flashed at so small a size that the students could only consciously perceive．A quarter of the words were food-related．After each word, each person was asked how bright the word was and asked to choose which of two words they’d seen-a food-related word like cake or a neutral word like boat. Each word appeared too briefly for the participant to really read it． Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying food- related words. Because the word appeared too quickly for them to be reliably seen, this means that the difference is in perception5, not in thinking processes, Radel says. “This is something great to me．Humans can really’perceive what they need or what they