cisions, actions, hungers and emotions arising from nonconscious brain activity (8). Our subjective experience of the choices we make and actions we take is that they are conscious and volitional, while in fact neuroscience research reveals the opposite to be true much of the time. Non-conscious processes generate decisions to which the conscious mind then assigns rationale and experiences itself as making the choice.
Our subjective experience and our preferred way to think about ourselves as conscious rational choice makers bias us to assign conscious choice. People struggling with their eating, clinicians and researchers are thus vulnerable to believing automatically generated explanations of non-conscious choices. Problematic eating is often seen as psychological, even symbolic; people with obesity, binge eating disorder and bulimia are “feeding a hungry heart;” girls and women with AN crave control or want to be as thin as models.
Alternatively, poor choices are attributed to dysfunctional brain circuits and neurotransmitter levels. Some researchers find a dismal synergy between the two types of explanations. For example, in an article titled, “When nothing tastes as good as skinny feels: the neurobiology of eating disorders,” prominent researchers argued that multiple neurobiological dysfunctions allow perfectionistic women to achieve their goals of becoming model thin (9). Such theories rest on a fundamental misconstrual of the concepts of “choice” and “volition” in the realm of energy homeostasis behaviors.
People with anorexia nervosa (AN) restrict food although they are starving; they hallucinate fat on their emaciated bodies and often exercise energetically (10). The baffling symptoms are remarkably homogeneous and highly heritable (11). Moreover, when people attempt to recover, they find their body and mind fight against eating more and exercising less. Their desire to recover is often undone by fears and compulsions that they do not control or understand.
Many species reduce feeding when it would distract them from migrating (12). In the 1950s, when experimental psychologists deprived lab rats of food to increase motivation to learn, they discovered that when housed with a running wheel, starved rats decreased feeding and increased running from one to 20 kilometers a day. Even normal weight rats limited to feeding only one hour a day will ignore food to run, as though a hypothalamic algorithm read the food limitation as indicating an inadequate foraging environment. They can eventually die of “self-starvation” (13). Lean-bred pigs that lose additional weight can develop “wasting pig syndrome” where they pace incessantly, ignore their feed, but eat straw (14). In rats, mice and humans numerous alterations in appetite and activity regulators could contribute to food restriction and hyperactivity (15). It is hard to imagine how the resultant odd “choices” would be learned or rewarded in pigs, rats or mice.
In a review of habit Anne Graybiel observed that, “habits invoke a dichotomy between the conscious, voluntary control over behavior, considered the essence of higher-order deliberative behavioral control, and lower-order behavioral control that is scarcely available to consciousness” (14). There is another way that “habits” can be coded in dorsolateral striatum circuits: through natural selection of genetic changes that control hormones and neurotransmitters. Graybiel noted that behaviors that animals do automatically upon birth, hatching, or when hormones beckon for mating and rearing are encoded the same way as learned habits in neural architecture (16).
Humans have dealt with famine and migrated extensively in the evolutionary past. For most of our time on earth people lived in sparsely distributed bands of hunter-gatherers that shared food; thus, starvation reliably indicated that food resources were depleted. A starving hunter-gatherer band faced a life and death gamble: either conserve energy and wait out the famine or mobilize their last reserves to search for better lands. If some individuals felt ener