Dana Small will deliver a special presidential lecture for the Society for Neuroscience, 2021.

Current and traditional models of ingestive behavior implicate the consciously perceived hedonic qualities of food as driving overeating, whereas subliminal signals arising from the gut serve to curb our uncontrolled desire for calories. This lecture will present recent evidence suggesting that the inverse is true. More specifically, evidence from human and animal models will be presented demonstrating that it is the subliminal metabolic signals that ascend to the brain to regulate not only food reinforcement, but also perception and higher order cognitive functions.