Research reveals that kidney and nerve tissue cells can learn and form memories in ways similar to neurons.
Our brains—and specifically, our brain cells—are commonly known to store memories. However, a team of scientists has discovered that cells from other parts of the body also play a role in memory, opening new pathways for understanding how memory functions and creating potential for enhancing learning and treating memory-related conditions.
“Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too,” explains New York University’s Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications.
The research sought to better understand if non-brain cells help with memory by borrowing from a long-established neurological property—the massed-spaced effect—which shows that we tend to retain information better when studied in spaced intervals rather than in a single, intensive session—better known as cramming for a test.
An NYU researcher administers chemical signals to non-neural cells grown in a culture plate. Credit: Nikolay Kukushkin
In the Nature Communications research, the scientists replicated learning over time by studying two types of non-brain human cells in a laboratory (one from nerve tissue and one from kidney tissue) and exposing them to different patterns of chemical signals—just like brain cells are exposed to patterns of neurotransmitters when we learn new information. In response, the non-brain cells turned on a “memory gene”—the same gene that brain cells turn on when they detect a pattern in the information and restructure their connections in order to form memories.
Tracking Memory Gene Activation
To monitor the memory and learning process, the scientists engineered these non-brain cells to make a glowing protein, which indicated when the memory gene was on and when it was off.
The results showed that these cells could determine when the chemical pulses, which imitated bursts of neurotransmitter in the brain, were repeated rather than simply prolonged—just as neurons in our brain can register when we learn with breaks rather than cramming all the material in one sitting. Specifically, when the pulses were delivered in spaced-out intervals, they turned on the “memory gene” more strongly, and for a longer time, than when the same treatment was delivered all at once.
“This reflects the massed-space effect in action,” says Kukushkin, a clinical associate professor of life science at NYU Liberal Studies and a research fellow at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. “It shows that the ability to learn from spaced repetition isn’t unique to brain cells, but, in fact, might be a fundamental property of all cells.”
The researchers add that the findings not only offer new ways to study memory, but also point to potential health-related gains.
“This discovery opens new doors for understanding how memory works and could lead to better ways to enhance learning and treat memory problems,” observes Kukushkin. “At the same time, it suggests that in the future, we will need to treat our body more like the brain—for example, consider what our pancreas remembers about the pattern of our past meals to maintain healthy levels of blood glucose or consider what a cancer cell remembers about the pattern of chemotherapy.”
Reference: “The massed-spaced learning effect in non-neural human cells” by N. V. Kukushkin, R. E. Carney, T. Tabassum and T. J. Carew, 7 November 2024, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-53922-x
The work was jointly supervised by Kukushkin and Thomas Carew, a professor in NYU’s Center for Neural Science. The study’s authors also included Tasnim Tabassum, an NYU researcher, and Robert Carney, an NYU undergraduate researcher at the time of the study.
This research was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (R01-MH120300-01A1).
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39 Comments
We already knew about this when organ transplant patients would start craving foods that their doner liked. Even if they’d never tried the food before in their life
GOLD (Au) is the Holly Grail of Neurons. Inyecting GOLD into the BRAIN, will solve the Memory Loss problem.
I always thought that it was hard to remember dreams sometimes because our bodies didn’t experience them, only our brains. This may mean I’m right!
I could swear I thought that was common knowledge as well, it’s something I learned playing pool, called muscle memory, the way I was told was if you repeatedly use the same movements with, for pool the process of stroke with your shooting arm, any muscles they’ll build towards being super efficient to that movement. That again would also be why people in certains sports like MMA gotta cross-train so they do limit their bodies movements and stay agile. I could be wrong but these or things I was told by normal everyday people that are in these two fields of life that are complete different industries so I just figured muscle memory was a commonly known thing.
I heard police talk about muscle memory. I suppose that it was learned during training. I heard it at least 15 years ago.
No, not exactly muscle memory
Actually, “muscle memory” comes from the brain building pathways between specific actions that the muscles make. It’s why you can ride a bike or drive a car without really thinking about it. Those pathways in the brain eventually build shortcuts making it easier to accomplish the function.
Wow. That’s a brilliant & perhaps an original thought. I wonder if you’re the first person to think of it.
It would be confusing if we remembered dreams as if they were reality.
Sometimes I do, but rarely.
I considered that because it was so frustrating to have a really good dream, and the memory kept fading.
How do you think sleepwalkers would respond to this?
So I gather when you get a transplant you are also getting some of the memories of the donor? ** Scientists or doctor response wanted,
I had read that the heart was the only organ that retained a person’s individual memory after death. This new information makes sense, since all cells are part of the greater whole. Sometimes the most obvious is the last to be recognized.
I thought this was common knowledge already – qnyone who has spent a lifetime drawing or playing an instrument can attest to this.
Precisely.
Didn’t you know something is true only when an academic let’s us know it is true?
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
Bam, right in the knowledge basket. Thanks mister.
Next thing you know, there will be serious scientific papers written about making decisions with the little brain.
Isn’t this the same as muscle “memory”? The memory that explains how your fingers can remember letters on a keyboard without any brain power, how you can drive a car or bicycle, completely “absent minded”, and play some sports and musical instruments without any brain effort. The muscles just “remember” and do what they need to do.
That was my question, too. Kind of a strange story, no?
When you say “without any brain power”… have you actually seen EEG data to support this? There’s a difference between not requiring a conscious effort/thought, and not having your brain involved in the process at all. I very much doubt my fingers are capable of spelling anything without the language center of my brain involved. Otherwise my fingers would just be going through the motions of typing random words/letters all the time, no?
A robotic assembly process could become increasingly efficient over time, as an AI controlling it incorporated additional data and improved its algorithm. That wouldn’t mean the assembly apparatus itself was retaining any memory whatsoever of the actions it was performing – all of the improvement would be happening in the overall system’s “brain”. I’ve seen no evidence – prior to what is discussed in this article, and even here they don’t address such complex activities – that “muscle memory” is anything more than a misnomer of something that takes place entirely in the brain.
I have an adult, disabled child, with no short term memory, due to a rare form of encephalitis she had right before she turned 10. I keep watching and hunting, hoping for the day that there is legitimate help for her.
Didn’t we know this already?
Isn’t RNA the memory of DNA?
When a cockroach head is cut off, still it crawls for sometime. I was wondering how this could happen, when the brain containing head is cut off. Now I understand, the muscle brain is responsible for the body movement without head
Just went through a prostatectomy. I wonder how many memories I lost. Probably ought to apply for a permanent disability.
The news is at least 40 years old. And we’ve progressed way more than this.
Life is in the blood, the human body is a basic robot for your spirit, in which your spirit can use water as the conductor to release energy thru neurotransmitters to bring forth your zodiac character which makes you. Our bodies lack rare metals like gold to eat that helps the conductivity and healing.
The body is the “spacesuit” for the soul. The body needs physical food, the “food” of the soul is knowledge.
Gold is poisonous,it will kill cells.
Gold is poisonous to cells.
This is really interesting, as it was in a “Spiritual Protection” book, and maybe a “Shadow Work” book, the latter written by a psychologist, that I first heard about this idea. Of course in the spiritual book, it was more about how traumatic experiences and ‘negative energy’ can be stored based on the idea that other cells in the body may hold memories, whereas in the other it was much more of a scientific, factual approach , mostly comparing cells in the gut to those in the brain, and I guess she must have been basing it off of very early theories (as here it states it has only now been proven). Either way, I’m excited to see the outcomes of this type of research!
Add this to “things Aquinas already knew”.
Funded by the NIH – probably doomed to aggressive DOGE treatment by dude bro in the near future.
As an Acupuncturist this has already been known. Short Term Memory is lodged in the Kidneys, Long Term Memory is Heart. Please allow me to fast forward your research about 30 – 40 years when you come to the determination of ‘Organ Centered Consciousness’. Remember that, ‘Organ Centered Consciousness’. Discovered by Acupuncture Theory, put into practice by Saam Medical Meditation.
https://www.amazon.com/Saam-Medical-Meditation-Transcendental-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B00LY9R77U
https://www.amazon.com/Structures-Knowledge-Organ-Centered-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B07FVYGD7R
I’m not sure if you are aware, but there is a very big difference between belief and fact. There is no evidence that your short-term memory is stored in the kidneys: in fact, there’s actually a lot of evidence against that claim. It is totally fine to have your own beliefs: many cultures have beliefs similar to this. However, acting as if this is factual is very harmful.
Assassin’s Creed in the making.
Every massage therapist on the planet already knew this. Empirical experience.
This is such an incredible discovery! It’s amazing to see how science continues to uncover new insights into the human body and its capabilities. As someone who loves learning about both science and faith, I couldn’t help but think about how this idea is reflected in the Quran.
Over 1,400 years ago, the Quran already spoke about something similar in Surah An-Nur (24:24) , where Allah says:
‘On the Day when their tongues, their hands, and their feet will bear witness against them as to what they used to do.’
This verse shows that our body parts—like our hands, feet, and even our tongues—will testify about our actions on the Day of Judgment. It’s like the Quran was hinting at the idea that our bodies might “remember” or reflect what we’ve done, which aligns so beautifully with what modern science is starting to explore today.
To me, this just goes to show how timeless and profound the Quran’s teachings are. It’s inspiring to see how discoveries like these deepen our appreciation for both the wonders of creation and the wisdom shared through Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). SubhanAllah—what a beautiful reminder of the harmony between faith and science!”