When a rat found food with real nutritional value, neurons feeding into its hippocampus released more of a chemical the brain needs to form memories. When researchers cut the signal coming from its gut, that increase vanished and the animal did worse at remembering where the food had been.
That is the core of a study published July 27 in Nature Communications, led by Scott Kanoski of the University of Southern California's Dornsife College. The paper's own title states the model: the vagus nerve promotes memory in rats.
