How the Brain Saves Energy When Food Is Scary

Researchers found that when flies are starving, a brain pathway needed to form an energetically costly type of long-term memory shuts down. This suggests that turning off that process conserved energy and preserved their lives. It wasn't known whether the much larger, cognitively advanced brains of mammals did anything similar. The new paper offers the first look into how the brain adapts to save energy once food has been scarce but not nonexistent for a long time.