what a new study has discovered studying flies

The brain is an extremely energy-demanding organ, as it needs a large amount of glucose to function correctly. But sometimes not everything focuses on functioning to live, but also to accumulate new memories or knowledge, something that students who put themselves in front of books need above all. And now we know that sugar can be your best ally.

A new paradigm. A priori, we may think that what we eat is like a large amount of gasoline that we pour into the tank we have inside us. However, a recent study published in Nature describes an unprecedented biological mechanism, pointing out that it is not sugar that magically improves memory, but rather it is consuming it after learning something new, such as a study session, that can consolidate it. All this along with a good rest too.

What has been seen? Here the researchers subjected a group of flies to aversive learning that began to be spaced out over time, in this way a neutral stimulus was associated with an experience that was detected as unpleasant so that they learned to reject it.

Under this pretext, the researchers observed that subjecting the flies to this learning system causes the “hijacking” of the fructose-detecting neurons, which is a type of carbohydrate, in the brain of the flies.

There is more. The fascinating thing about all this is that it happens even when the flies are completely full, so the learning generates a kind of temporary “non-homeostatic hunger.” In this way, after the cognitive effort, if the fly ingests sugar, these neurons, which had been disinhibited by learning, become massively activated. And it is something fundamental because activation triggers the release of a hormone called thyrostimulinwhich acts as the definitive signal to consolidate long-term memory.

It’s not just about the taste. This article does not come out of nowhere, but already in 2017 a research group showed that the brain is too smart to be fooled by the sweeteners that give us the sweet taste. Here the concept “caloric frustration memory” was introduced, which pointed out that the brain perfectly distinguishes between sweet taste and real energy value. That is why for certain memories to be optimally consolidated, the nutritional value matters as much or more than the simple taste reward.

Furthermore, this same French team demonstrated in 2024 that diverting the flow of glucose to neurons plays a vital role in memory memory. fruit fly, and that the metabolic activation of certain areas of the brain is an essential trigger for long-term memory.

In humans. Although this is something that has been seen in flies right now, it offers us an incredible window into evolutionary neurobiology. This is something that gives us hope that, at a fundamental level, brains have evolved to link energy availability with metabolic expenditure in order to create new memories.

If we look at the literature, there are studies that have analyzed this same effect in our own brains. Specifically, it has been seen that administering glucose can temporarily improve certain cognitive aspects. This is especially noticeable in verbal memory, episodic memory, and in hippocampal-dependent tasks such as object-location binding. Although in no case should you gorge yourself on sugar to be able to learn much faster.

Images | Marcos Paulo Prado Daniel Kraus

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