A particular subset of brain cells has been identified by a team of US scientists, which may help to explain why individuals with memory issues frequently overeat.

The group demonstrated how increased hunger and disordered eating might result from persons who also frequently forget about their most recent meals.

The group of brain cells can encode not only what food was consumed but also when it was consumed, according to research from the University of Southern California.

The researchers refer to the specialized memory traces that retain information about the experience of food consumption as “meal engrams,” which are formed when neurons in the ventral hippocampus region of the brain become active while eating.

The current study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications, found engrams devoted to eating events, but researchers have long examined engrams for their function in preserving memories and other experiences in the brain.

Scott Kanoski, a professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, described meal engrams as “functioning like sophisticated biological databases that store multiple types of information such as where you were eating and the time that you ate.”

The results may potentially guide new treatment strategies for managing weight and treating obesity, Kanoski continued.

The new research indicates that improving meal memory formation may be just as significant as boosting exercise or limiting food intake, which are the two main approaches used in weight management today.

The study team provided the first real-time perspective of how meal memories are formed by using cutting-edge neuroscience tools to watch laboratory rats’ brain activity while they ate.

Unlike brain cells involved in other forms of memory formation, meal memory neurons are unique.

Lab rats exhibited reduced recall for food locations but normal spatial memory for tasks unrelated to food when researchers deliberately damaged these neurons, suggesting a specific system for processing information about meals.

The lateral hypothalamus, a part of the brain that has long been recognized to regulate appetite and eating habits, is in communication with meal memory neurons, according to the study. The lab rats overate and lost memory of where they ate when this hippocampus-hypothalamus connection was disrupted.