Scientists have recently discovered the precise place in the brain that hunger signals stem from and of course the first thing they do is try turning those signals off.

This required some manipulating of genetics in the mice that Joshua Jennings and Garret Stuber of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used in their experiment as gizmodo.com reports; so don’t get too excited about never being hungry again. Jennings and Stuber programmed the neurons in these mice that send messages to the lateral hypothalamus to respond to light stimulation. Depending on whether the light was on or not, one group of mice would not touch food, despite their hunger, and another group would not stop eating despite being full.

A video shows one mouse demonstrating no interest in the food around it when the little cap on its head isn’t lit up. However, when the cap does light up, the mouse immediately begins to chow down, but when the light turns off again, the mouse just as quickly stops eating. It would be a boring display if it weren’t for the utter strangeness of hunger shown as something with an off-switch as easily manipulated as the buttons on an old GameBoy.

The hope is that this knowledge will lead to an ability to help fight the obesity wave as well as eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Unfortunately, the research is definitely a long way from any kind of implementation on that front (We’d be loath to all go around with strange caps on our heads, for one thing, and as handy as mice might be for experiments such as these, they’re a far cry from a human test subject). Turning off or turning on hunger seems like a scary proposition overall to me: messing with the brain is always a sensitive endeavor and flipping hunger like a switch — when eating is necessary for survival — seems particularly risky.