A hormone that influences when and how frequently animals eat also appears to affect memory, USC scientists have found.
The study was published in the journal Current Biology on Sept. 17.
Animals and humans have the hormone ghrelin in their stomachs. Ghrelin tells animals, as well as humans, when they are hungry and helps regulate their metabolism, but scientists have never been certain how exactly it works.
To learn more about how ghrelin influences hunger, metabolism and memory, researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences collaborated with international scientists on a study on rats.
They disrupted the ability of the ghrelin hormone to communicate to the vagus nerve, a nerve that signals from the gut to the brain, and then monitored the impact on their feeding and cognitive behaviors.
The rats were not anxious, but they began eating more frequently, said…
