If you’ve ever gone grocery shopping when you’re super hungry, you may have b ought a few foods in strange combinations that you later regretted.

“It’s not just one thing that you’re more likely to buy,” said Michael Crossley, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England. “Your entire perception of everything is slightly altered when you undergo hunger.”

Dr. Crossley has found that we’re not the only creatures in the animal kingdom that make unusual dietary choices when hungry: Hungry pond snails will also swallow potentially harmful foods they’d normally spit out. They do this under the control of brains that work in the same basic way as our own.

“They will have a go on anything, and it’s the same thing in humans during extended food deprivation,” said Dr. Crossley, summarizing research he and his colleagues published recently in Science Advances.