{"id":230150,"date":"2026-01-30T01:27:38","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T07:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/fruit-fly-fox-neurons-show-how-brains-assign-value-to-food"},"modified":"2026-01-30T01:27:38","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T07:27:38","slug":"fruit-fly-fox-neurons-show-how-brains-assign-value-to-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/fruit-fly-fox-neurons-show-how-brains-assign-value-to-food","title":{"rendered":"Fruit fly \u2018Fox\u2019 neurons show how brains assign value to food"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/fruit-fly-fox-neurons-show-how-brains-assign-value-to-food2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Why do we sometimes keep eating even when we\u2019re full and other times turn down food completely? Why do we crave salty things at certain times, and sweets at other times? The answers, according to new neuroscience research at the University of Delaware, may lie in a tiny brain in an organism you might not expect.<\/p>\n<p>Lisha Shao, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, has uncovered a neural network in the brains of fruit flies that represents a very early step in how the brain decides\u2014minute by minute\u2014whether a specific food is worth eating. The work was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cell.com\/current-biology\/fulltext\/S0960-9822(25)01711-7\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Current Biology.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur goal is to understand how the brain assigns value\u2014why sometimes eating something is rewarding and other times it\u2019s not,\u201d Shao said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why do we sometimes keep eating even when we\u2019re full and other times turn down food completely? Why do we crave salty things at certain times, and sweets at other times? The answers, according to new neuroscience research at the University of Delaware, may lie in a tiny brain in an organism you might not [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1506,47,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-food","category-neuroscience","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}