Food plays an important role in many important moments in our lives, whether it's grand occasions, like the wedding banquet, or smaller ones, like the weekend barbecue, the lunch date, or the family dinner time.
A new study suggests good food might be more than a mere accessory to those special occasions: it might even directly boost the brain's memory-making machinery, helping to store away those important memories.
Biologist Scott Kanoski, of the University of Southern California, led a study recently published in Nature Communications that suggests food can quite literally impact the formation of memory, via a chain of nerve signaling.
In a series of rat experiments, Kanoski and team discovered that after a nutritious meal, a signal is sent up the vagus nerve, from the gut to the brain.
That signal reaches neurons in the medial septum, a brain region that impacts activity in the hippocampus.
