For decades, scientists believed that glial cells—the brain’s “support staff”—were just passive helpers to the neurons that do the heavy lifting of thinking and remembering. But that view is rapidly changing.

Astrocytes, the most abundant type of glial cell, play a fundamental role in memory. Despite most hippocampal synapses being contacted by an astrocyte, there are no current theories that explain how neurons, synapses, and astrocytes might collectively contribute to memory function. We demonstrate that fundamental aspects of astrocyte morphology and physiology naturally lead to a dynamic, high-capacity associative memory system. The neuron–astrocyte networks generated by our framework are closely related to popular machine learning architectures known as Dense Associative Memories. Adjusting the connectivity pattern, the model developed here leads to a family of associative memory networks that includes a Dense Associative Memory and a Transformer as two limiting cases.