Hunger can affect the brain in ways that affect whether we “want” or “need” to eat. But it may also drive a need to acquire not just food, but material things as well, new research shows.

The study, by Alison Jing Xu of the University of Minnesota and colleagues, indicates when we are low on calories, we feel hungry and seek out food — not entirely a surprising conclusion.

But the findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also determined that hunger subliminally shifts our cognition in surprising other ways, Fox News reports.

For the study, Xu’s team had volunteers look at a screen where combinations of letters appeared for a fraction of a second, and subjects had to rapidly say whether the letters formed correctly spelled words. Those who were hungry were more accurate at recognizing food-related words.

“So our basic animal wiring (‘me hungry, me get food’) can unconsciously infiltrate how we perform the very sophisticated human task of reading comprehension,” Xu said.

But Xu’s team also found hunger doesn’t just prime us to think about food acquisition; it primes us to think about acquisition in general.