Kidney memory? Science Daily reports on how we sometimes expand our ability to remember – by using cells other than brain cells to store the information we’re learning:
“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.
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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.
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.
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You can read more of the research here, in Nature Communications.