{"id":219254,"date":"2025-08-02T00:08:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-02T05:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/what-can-a-cell-remember"},"modified":"2025-08-02T00:08:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-02T05:08:12","slug":"what-can-a-cell-remember","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/what-can-a-cell-remember","title":{"rendered":"What Can a Cell Remember?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

In a provocative study published in Nature Communications <\/em>late last year, the neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin and his mentor Thomas J. Carew at New York University showed that human kidney cells growing in a dish can \u201cremember\u201d patterns of chemical signals<\/a> when they\u2019re presented at regularly spaced intervals \u2014 a memory phenomenon common to all animals, but unseen outside the nervous system until now. Kukushkin is part of a small but enthusiastic cohort of researchers studying \u201caneural,\u201d or brainless, forms of memory. What does a cell know of itself? So far, their research suggests that the answer to McClintock\u2019s question might be: much more than you think.<\/p>\n

Brainless Learning<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n

The prevailing wisdom in neuroscience has long been that memory and learning are consequences of \u201csynaptic plasticity\u201d in the brain. The connections between clusters of neurons simultaneously active during an experience strengthen into networks that remain active even after the experience has passed, perpetuating it as a memory. This phenomenon, expressed by the adage \u201cNeurons that fire together, wire together,\u201d has shaped our understanding of memory for the better part of a century. But if solitary nonneural cells can also remember and learn, then networks of neurons can\u2019t be the whole story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a provocative study published in Nature Communications late last year, the neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin and his mentor Thomas J. Carew at New York University showed that human kidney cells growing in a dish can \u201cremember\u201d patterns of chemical signals when they\u2019re presented at regularly spaced intervals \u2014 a memory phenomenon common to all animals, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}