ReviewThe anterior medial temporal lobes: Their role in food intake and body weight regulation
Section snippets
The anterior medial temporal lobes – classical role
The anterior medial temporal lobes are composed of two major structures – the amygdalae and the hippocampi. Both of them belong to the most widely studied areas of the brain, notably because of their involvement in key cognitive and affective functions.
It is classical neuroscience textbook knowledge that the amygdala is involved in emotion processing (e.g., [72], [175]). In particular, its role in fear conditioning paradigms has often been underlined [89], [114]. Recently, the idea that the
Klüver-Bucy syndrome
Klüver and Bucy [86] reported a syndrome that follows bitemporal dysfunction. Among other things, this syndrome is characterized by a hyperorality, bulimia, and the ingestion of non-food items (such as tea bags, feces or even shoe polish). These symptoms were reported both in rhesus monkeys and in humans (see for instance [91]). Thus, it appears that the dysfunction of both temporal lobes can lead to excessive intake of food as well as non-food items.
Psychomotor epileptic patients
Gastaut [42] has reported two types of
Rationale for the interest in the amygdala in relation to food intake
If the amygdala is involved in relevance processing in general, it follows that it should also be involved in assessing the (more specific) meaningfulness of food-related stimuli (e.g., [21]), because of their high relevance for homeostasis. Furthermore, the same argument can be applied to cues predicting food intake. In this article, we will consequently develop the hypothesis that the amygdala is involved (1) in the relevance processing of food stimuli, including (2) in the detection of cues
Rationale for the interest in hippocampus in relation to food intake
To suggest a potential role of the hippocampus in food intake and body weight regulation may at first strike cognitive and affective researchers in human neuroscience as a somewhat unconventional idea. Although highly connected to the amygdala [127], it has been claimed that the “removal of the hippocampus does not affect olfaction or taste” ([11], p. 857). However, “evidence exists for input to the hippocampus from the amygdaloid complex, implicating it in the processing of emotional
Interactions between the amygdala and the hippocampus
As previously mentioned, the selfish brain theory (e.g., [121]) assumes that the brain (approximately 2% of the body's mass) gives priority to its energy needs (approximately 50% of the total body glucose utilization is related to its metabolism). The hippocampus/amygdala system is key in this process – it is assumed to be involved in energy homeostasis and metabolic processes (i.e., glucose fluxes; [162]). Accordingly, the selfish brain theory assumes that obesity is “the sequelae of a
Conclusion
In this review, we have argued that the anterior medial temporal lobes – composed of the amygdala and the hippocampus - may play an important role in food intake and body weight regulation. The amygdala is essential to assess the relevance of food stimuli, and to cue-elicited feeding and cue-induced inhibition of feeding. In modern environments, where cues associated with feeding are much more present than cues associated with inhibition of feeding, the abundance of these cues may lead to
Outstanding questions
Are the anterior medial temporal lobes also crucial for representing future food intake? Information related to recent eating is encoded in memory and influences future food intake (e.g., [54], [55], [58]). The hippocampus encodes information relative not only to past events but also to future ones [153]. The amygdala is involved in representing future positive events [146]. From this evidence the following question follows: Can hippocampus and amygdala dysfunctions relate in difficulties
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by an Early.Postdoc mobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to Géraldine Coppin (PBGEP1-139853). The authors thank Vanessa Sennwald, Dr. Alexander Skiles, Prof. Dana M. Small and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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