Recent studies challenge the idea that memory and learning depend on a nervous system.
Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin and colleagues at New York University showed that human kidney cells growing in a dish can “remember” patterns of chemical signals when they’re presented at regularly spaced intervals.
This suggests that nonneural cells can count and detect patterns at different time intervals, even though they can’t do it at the speed of a neuron, and they appear to remember a stimulus for longer when it is delivered at spaced intervals — a phenomenon found in all animals.
While the prevailing view in neuroscience has long been that memory and learning are consequences of “synaptic plasticity” in the brain, these findings suggest that neurons and all kinds of cell types may memorize in the same way.
