On University of Southern California Dornsife Week: Excessive eating can have many harmful effects.
Scott Kanoski, professor of biological sciences, tries to understand the mechanisms behind these effects.
Professor of Biological Sciences at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Scott Kanoski’s research focuses on behavioral neuroscience, ingestive behavior, energy balance, neuroendocrinology, learning & memory and systems neuroscience. He is the principal investigator at the Kanoski Lab. The lab’s goal is to discover the neural systems and psychological processes that control energy balance, with a particular focus on understanding the neurobiological substrates that regulate obesity-promoting behaviors such as food impulsivity, environmental cue-induced eating, and excessive meal size.
From 2022-2025 he was the President of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior and is currently the Co-Director of the USC Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute and the Deputy Editor of the journal Comprehensive Physiology.
What If Forgetting Your Last Meal Made You Overeat?
Obesity rates have soared over the past 40 years. Yet the brain systems that drive the excessive eating behaviors contributing to obesity remain poorly understood. As a biological scientist studying neural and psychological processes, my team and I set out to explore how the brain regulates behaviors like food impulsivity, cue-triggered eating, and meal size.
We recently discovered how the brain automatically tracks what, where, and when we eat. Using cutting-edge neuroscience tools, we observed the activity in rats’ brains in real time as they ate, capturing how “meal memories” — or engrams — are formed.
We found that a specific group of memory-forming neurons — distinct from those involved in other types of memory — are activated during short pauses between bites. When we disrupted these neurons, the rats appeared to forget their last meal, leading them to overeat at the next one.
We suspect this memory system evolved to help early mammals, including our primate ancestors, keep track of scarce food sources. For the brain, meals may be among the most important things to remember. But in the modern world, regularly consuming forgettable meals may also contribute to overeating and eating disorders.
People with memory impairments — such as those caused by dementia or brain injury — may overeat simply because they forget they’ve already eaten. Even distracted eating, like snacking while scrolling a phone or watching TV, could weaken meal memories and promote subsequent overconsumption. In these cases, the brain fails to properly catalog the eating experience, forming a weak or incomplete meal engram.
These findings could one day change the way we treat obesity. Right now, most approaches focus on eating less—or moving more. But our research points to something else: Helping the brain better encode meals might be important as well.
Read More:
[Nature] – Ventral hippocampus neurons encode meal-related memory
[USC Today] – Brain cell discovery may explain excessive hunger
