They found that girls with anorexia nervosa had a larger insula, a part of the brain that is active when we taste food, and
a larger orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain that tells a person when to stop eating.
Subjects with the greatest reduction of the unpleasantness of the pain — which is what most people care about — exhibited the greatest activation of regions in the
orbitofrontal cortex and the
largest reduction in the thalamus (gating the incoming sensory information).