Late-Afternoon Munchies? Blame Your Brain
Heavy thinking burns calories — go ahead, give your brain that bag of chips
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It’s 4:45 p.m. at the office and you’re feeling mentally drained. You can barely get yourself to open — let alone answer — one more email. You open your file drawer which contains zero files, but does contain multiple snacks. Ah, yes: Chips!
There’s a scientific explanation for this late-afternoon work-snack phenomenon. Research shows that the brain burns calories with heavy thinking. Demanding mental work, even done sitting stationary at a desk, requires physical energy, and eventually the brain wants you to replenish it. It all comes down to glucose, a form of simple sugar, and how the brain uses it.
“The brain uses fuel to do work,” says Ewan C. McNay, Ph.D, Associate Professor and Area Head, Behavioral Neuroscience University at Albany. “That fuel in humans is in the form almost exclusively of sugar, which contains calories.”
“We used to think that there was just a pool of glucose that your brain uses,” adds Benjamin Ampel, a researcher at the University at Albany. “Actually, glucose is compartmentalized in your brain, with each region having its own localized pool. It’s all connected, but that means that when you use a certain part of your brain intensively, we see glucose levels in that area drop, which is why you get fatigued.”
This mental fatigue results in what Ampel refers to as a “transient decrease in cognitive ability,” which is the phenomena of feeling so worn down by a specific task that requires heavy thinking that you physically can’t do any more work.
When the brain is actively working, the body is burning more calories than it would if you were at home, binge-watching your favorite series for the third time. When the brain is deeply processing information, neurons are firing off more.
“Your brain is really protective of its fuel state. So even a small reduction in the level of glucose in the brain is enough to trigger hunger responses.”
“Increased neural activity will lead to increased fuel consumption,” says McNay, referring to…
