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Trick question: A study shows that people who have certain types of amnesia (think Memento) will be unable to remember having a meal but this will not affect their ability to feel “full.” So they may not be able to ever remember having a meal, yet have no desire to have one. That must be strange. However, the study shows these people can be more inclined to eat multiple meals since they don’t actually remember having eaten recently:
What is the relationship between memory and appetite? We explored this question by examining preferences for recently consumed food in patients with amnesia. Although the patients were unable to remember having eaten, and were inclined to eat multiple meals, we found that sensory-specific satiety was intact in these patients. The data suggest that sensory-specific satiety can occur in the absence of explicit memory for having eaten and that impaired sensory-specific satiety does not underlie the phenomenon of multiple-meal eating in amnesia. Overeating in amnesia may be due to disruption of learned control by physiological aftereffects of a recent meal or to problems utilizing internal cues relating to nutritional state.
Source: “Sensory-Specific Satiety Is Intact in Amnesics Who Eat Multiple Meals” from Psychological Science
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