A team of US scientists has discovered a specific group of brain cells that could explain why people with memory problems often overeat.
The team found that individuals who frequently forget recent meals may experience excessive hunger, which can lead to disordered eating.
Researchers from the University of Southern California have shown that a specific group of brain cells can create memories of meals, encoding not just what food was eaten but also when it was eaten.
During eating, neurons in the ventral hippocampus region of the brain become active and form what the team of researchers calls “meal engrams” — specialised memory traces that store information about the experience of food consumption.
While scientists have long studied engrams for their role in storing memories and other experiences in the brain, a new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, has identified engrams dedicated to specific meal experiences.
“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,” said Scott Kanoski, Professor of Biological Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Kanoski added that the findings could eventually inform new clinical approaches for treating obesity and weight management.
Current weight management strategies often focus on restricting food intake or increasing exercise; however, new research suggests that enhancing meal memory formation could be equally important.
The research team employed advanced neuroscience techniques to observe the brain activity of laboratory rats as they ate, providing the first real-time view of how meal memories are formed.
The memory neurons are distinct from brain cells involved in other types of memory formation.
When researchers selectively destroyed these neurons, lab rats showed impaired memory for food locations. Still, they retained standard spatial memory for non-food-related tasks, indicating a specialized system dedicated to processing information related to meals.
The study revealed that meal memory neurons communicate with the lateral hypothalamus, a brain region long known to control hunger and eating behaviour. When this hippocampus-hypothalamic connection was blocked, the lab rats overate and were unable to remember where they had consumed meals.
–IANS
