{"id":238297,"date":"2026-06-04T02:05:59","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T07:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/scientists-identify-a-cell-type-in-the-brain-that-was-previously-ignored-and-it-may-explain-why-human-memory-has-no-known-upper-limit"},"modified":"2026-06-04T02:05:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T07:05:59","slug":"scientists-identify-a-cell-type-in-the-brain-that-was-previously-ignored-and-it-may-explain-why-human-memory-has-no-known-upper-limit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/scientists-identify-a-cell-type-in-the-brain-that-was-previously-ignored-and-it-may-explain-why-human-memory-has-no-known-upper-limit","title":{"rendered":"Scientists identify a cell type in the brain that was previously ignored and it may explain why human memory has no known upper limit"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. That number appears in almost every popular account of memory and intelligence, and it tends to carry an implicit argument: that the scale of human cognition follows from the scale of this cell count. What is less often mentioned is that the brain contains a roughly comparable number of a different cell type entirely, one that researchers have treated, for most of the history of neuroscience, as little more than biological scaffolding.<\/p>\n

A paper published on 23 May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em><\/a> puts forward a new hypothesis about what those cells, called astrocytes, might actually be doing. The work comes from a team at MIT: lead author Leo Kozachkov, Jean-Jacques Slotine, a professor of mechanical engineering and brain and cognitive sciences, and Dmitry Krotov of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, who is the paper\u2019s senior author. Their claim is not that astrocytes have been misunderstood in any dramatic sense; it is the more careful suggestion that they may be doing computational work that neurons, on their own, cannot account for.<\/p>\n

This is a hypothesis supported by a mathematical model. The experimental work needed to test it has not yet been done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. That number appears in almost every popular account of memory and intelligence, and it tends to carry an implicit argument: that the scale of human cognition follows from the scale of this cell count. What is less often mentioned is that the brain contains a roughly comparable [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2229,47,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-mathematics","category-neuroscience","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238297","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}