Other Parts of Our Body Can Make Memories, Not Only the Brain

Most people know that cramming isn’t the best way to remember information, but not a lot of people know that we don’t only use our brain to remember things. In fact, it is likely that almost all our cells have the potential to remember.

Nikolay V. Kukushkin along with his colleagues (Nature Communications Journal), conducted research which found that “other cells in the body can learn and form memories”.

Since we know that cramming isn’t good for remembering, the researchers used the massed spaced effect. It is recognised to be a better technique for remembering since when we study in spaced intervals over a longer period, the information truly sticks.

To understand how they conducted the study and made sure that the non-brain cells were learning, we need to understand how brain cells usually form memories. New memories in essence are a new pattern of connections between cells, meaning when they are exposed to a new pattern of neurotransmitters, they change how their connections are structured. When they do this, they also release a “memory gene” that we can identify as them learning the pattern.

Now that we understand how it works in the brain, we can understand how they replicated this process in non-brain cells (a nerve and liver cell). To make sure they could clearly see the “memory gene”, they engineered the cells to release a glowing protein with it.

Then they subjected the non-brain cells to chemical pulses that imitated bursts of neurotransmitters. To test if they were really learning and remembering, they tried spacing out the patterns of pulses to imitate the massed spaced effect and just prolonging the patterns to imitate cramming of information.

After conducting the experiment with both the nerve and liver cell, they found that just like our brains they produced more of the memory gene (there was more glow from the protein) when the pulses were spaced out in intervals rather than prolonged. This is what they would have expected to find if the cells were really learning just like brain cells. As stated by a clinical associate professor of life science at NYU Liberal Studies and a research fellow at NYU’s Centre for Neural Science, Nikolay V. Kukushkin, “it shows that the ability to learn from spaced repetition isn’t unique to brain cells, but in fact, might be fundamental property of all cells.”

Jointly with Thomas Carew, a professor in NYU’s Centre for Neural Science, Tasnim Tabassum, an NYU researcher, and Robert Carney, an NYU undergraduate, they concluded that these findings could offer new ways of studying memory and health connecting to the memory of cells. As they underline, “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.”