Topic: starvation

Synaptic plasticity allows animals to adapt to the environment. However, making permanent synaptic changes requires a significant amount of metabolic energy. This cost is so high that learning reduces the lifespan of fruit flies by 20% when feeding is stopped (Mery and Kawecki, 2005). Thus the brain should carefully regulate learning. For instance, flies stop some forms of memory formation to survive upon starvation (Placais and Preat, 2013). To examine when it is best to halt energy-costly learning, we used a computational reinforcement learning model which takes the animal’s energy budget in