New Delhi: A recent study by researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) has uncovered a key neurological link between memory and eating behavior, revealing how forgetting recent meals can lead to overeating. The study identifies a specific group of brain cells that are responsible for creating and storing "meal memories," which help regulate hunger and food intake.
Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research highlights a group of neurons located in the ventral hippocampus—a region of the brain known for its role in memory formation. These neurons activate during eating and form what scientists have termed "meal engrams"—specialized memory traces that store detailed information about a person’s eating experience, including what food was consumed, when, and where.
“Meal engrams function like sophisticated biological databases that store multiple types of information, such as where you were eating, as well as the time that you ate,” explained Scott Kanoski, Professor of Biological Sciences at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
To explore this further, the team used advanced neuroscience tools to monitor the brain activity of laboratory rats as they consumed food. This allowed researchers to capture the real-time formation of meal memories. They found that these meal-specific memory cells were separate from those involved in general memory formation.
In experiments where the researchers destroyed these neurons, the rats lost the ability to remember food-related experiences, such as where food was located. However, they retained normal memory for other spatial tasks, indicating that meal memories are handled by a distinct system in the brain.
Further investigation revealed that these meal memory neurons interact with the lateral hypothalamus, a part of the brain long associated with hunger and eating behavior. When this communication pathway was disrupted, the rats began to overeat and forgot previous meal locations.
These findings open new possibilities for understanding the neurological basis of overeating and obesity. While current weight-loss approaches mainly focus on diet restriction and increased physical activity, the study suggests that supporting memory function—specifically meal memory—could be a valuable strategy for controlling appetite and managing weight.