Let's Digest the Science Behind Being "Hangry," the Wrath of an Empty Stomach

One of the best “people are just meat” things I can think of — not Earth-bound deities, but terribly designed biological machines full of shit and blood and complicated collections of cells — is a study

released last year

in the

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

about a group of Israeli judges tasked with granting or denying prisoners parole. Eight judges took on over 1,000 applications made by prisoners over a 10 month period, wielded the power to potentially ruin over 1,000 lives. The researchers, led by Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, (possibly) discovered a unexpected something driving the judge’s decisions:

hanger

.

Hanger, which has a great deal of other nicknames on the internet, like motherfucking “super-grumpy-mummy syndrome,” is simply being hungry and getting cranky because of it. The researchers charted the percentage rates of clemency granted to the prisoners based on when the decision was made in relationship to mealtime. What they found was not a statistical dip the numbers, but a straight-up plummeting. The judges at the beginning of the day were granting nearly two-thirds of prisoner’s parole requests; by the time just before their next meal, that number had dropped to almost zero. Post-mealtime, the number went back up to about two-thirds. This holds even after controlling for the two other things likely to influence decisions — recidivism and whether a prisoner is in a rehabilitation program. (Things like sex, race, and sentence length seemed to not have an impact.) In the end, we are left with hanger.

This post comes at the behest of a colleague requesting a scientific explanation for hanger, some physiology behind the wrath of the empty stomach. The researchers in the case of the judges had two possible explanations, and one isn’t hanger at all: the judges were depleted and tired and, thus, were making decisions based on the least effort required mentally to make that decision. (Thinking takes energy, of course.) The other hypothesis is that a blood sugar drop (and resulting hanger) is responsible, though this doesn’t work quite as well because the data makes it appear that the drop in parole approvals corresponds more to cases elapsed since mealtime, rather than time. Which is potentially a crucial distinction.

The suggestion remains, however, that the judges were just in a real shitty mood the farthest they were from a previous mealtime. And most anyone out there could probably come up with their anecdote in favor of the hanger hypothesis. Basically: you’re tired if you’re hungry. If your blood sugar is low, your liver will fire a message up to the ol’ lateral hypothalamus and this piece of your brain will register “hunger” and, ideally, you will start doing things to fix that situation. Otherwise, your body will go on dealing with a depleted amount of available glucose and corresponding lower energy levels, while you ruin the lives of prisoners in Israel.

A more recent study, from this year and conducted at the University of Kentucky, determined something interesting about the behavior of hungry pigeons. They’re impulsive. Basically the birds got a bunch of signals, signalling different liklihoods of food being delivered, with some of the signals being more or less reliable than others. The hungry birds choose poorly, gambling on unlikely but more reliable signals. Which is all interesting and may shed some light on the judges and the kinda Kafka-esque arbitrary-ness of freedom going on in their courtrooms, but it’s not neccessarily related to hanger.

But, an article in The New York Times several years back points out that in many animals, hunger increases alertness. “Your sensitivity to your external environment increases,” Dr. Mark Friedman, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, told the paper. “These sorts of needs open sensory gates. [It’s possibly why] someone playing music in the apartment below may be more irritating when you’re hungry than when you’re not.” A study released in 2010 in the journal PLoS Biology backs the idea up, finding that fruit flies deprived of food stayed more alert than satied fruit flies.

So, physiologically speaking, you might be more tired because your body isn’t getting the glucose it needs, but you’re brain is staying alert, or is at least more sensitive to the loud and annoying world. So, in the end, it’s probably that combination of being over-alert and over-tired equating to being hangry. So eat a candy bar already. Justice depends on it.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

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