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Gottfried, who did the study with two other scientists, Dr. Gottfried calls it ''the restaurant phenomenon.'' Psychologists refer to this as ''selective satiation.'' Dr. But the image associated with whichever food the subjects did not receive continued to elicit faster reaction times and a flurry of chemical activity in the amygdala and other brain areas. Gottfried and his colleagues found, the images associated with that food no longer drew as strong a response, and the subjects' emotional brain circuits quieted down. When the subjects were fed either a peanut butter sandwich or a bowl of vanilla ice cream, Dr. Then the researchers took their study, published last week in the journal Science, a step further. At the same time, their brains surged into action, with areas known to be involved in motivation and emotional processing - the amygdala, deep in the temporal lobe, the orbitofrontal cortex, and other structures lighting up on the brain scan.

The subjects reacted faster to the images paired with the food odors than to other images that had no pleasant associations. The subjects, who thought they were participating in an experiment about learning computer tasks, were quickly trained to associate the images with the food smells.