Curr Biol: Why do we get bitten by a snake for ten years? Maybe special neurons in the brain are at work!

February 13, 2021 // -- Negative experiences of food often make it unbearable to eat it again; in a recent study published in the international journalCurrent Biology, scientists from institutions such as the University of Sussex used snails as a study subject to find that bad experiences may trigger changes in the body's brain that could affect the body's future eating habits.
Like many other animals, snails like sugar and start eating it when they come into contact with it, but usually researchers do another aversion training, where the snail's behavior changes when sugar appears, and it refuses to eat sugar, even when it is hungry.
photo source: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain When researchers studied it carefully, they found a new neuron mechanism that may be effective in reversing the snail's response to sugar after receiving conditional reflex training; researcher Idiko Kemenes explains that there is a special neuron in the snail's brain that normally exists It inhibits the brain's supply loop, which is important because even without any food, the neural network in the brain is activated spontaneously, ensuring that the snail does not eat anything by suppressing the supply loop, but when sugar or other food stimuli are present, the neuron is suppressed, which in turn promotes the snail to start eating.
When the disgust training was conducted, the researchers found that this particular neuron, which reverses the snail's electrical response to sugar, makes it excited but not inhibited; in fact, a switch in the brain is flipped, which means that the snail does not eat sugar when it is given sugar, which inhibits its eating and does not promote its eating.
When the researchers gave the trained snails a piece of cucumbers, they found that snails still liked to eat healthy food, suggesting that the reaction may only be related to specific types of foods that snails are trained to reject.
researchers added that snails may provide them with a similar but very basic pattern of human brain function.
This inhibitory neuron effect, which inhibits the supply loop of the snail brain, is very similar to that of the human brain, where the cerebral cortical network is controlled by inhibition, thus avoiding the out-of-control activation mechanisms that cause obesity-induced overealing.
study, snails' negative experiences with sugar could be compared to ordering a bad curry takeaway as a result, which would put us off the dish in the future.
Researchers believe that similar transitions appear to occur in the human brain, where certain types of neurons reverse their activity based on negative associations to specific foods, and that when these neurons are completely removed from the snail brain, snails begin to show a preference for sugar.
suggests that neurons are necessary to express the body's learning behavior and to change its response to sugars.
, however, may not be able to rule out the sense path of sugar activation that is undergoing some changes, so they can't assume that's what's happening in the brain.
() Original source: Zsolt Pirger, Zita László, Souvik Naskar, et al. Interneuronal mechanisms for learning-induced switch in a sensory response that anticipates changes in behavioral outcomes, Current Biology (2021). doi：10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.072