Share on PinterestDo all our cells have a type of memory, and if so, how might this influence health? We investigate. Design by MNT; Photography by Grant Faint/Getty Images & Ed Reschke/Getty Images.

• A New York University study has found that kidney and nerve tissue cells can form memories much like brain cells.
• According to the study authors, their findings could help researchers better understand how to treat problems that affect memory.
• They also offer fresh insights into how human memory, as a whole, works.
• Another recent study, from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, has found that the memories of obesity stored in fat tissue cells may be partly responsible for the yo-yo weight loss effect.
• This study, conducted in mice with obesity, suggests that epigenetic changes affecting the nucleus, or central component, of a fat cell make it more difficult for individuals with obesity to maintain weight loss in the long run.

Memory is one of the most crucial aspects of our health and human identity. Through memory, we create our individuality, our specific relationships with the world we inhabit, and we learn to stay safe and make healthy choices.

Historically, the ability to make, maintain, and update memories has been tied to the human brain.

Increasingly, however, researchers are wondering if there is a whole-body memory, that is, if different parts of our bodies can also make and store a type of memory, and if so, how these other memories may be affected by and, in turn, impact aspects of our health.

Recently emerging evidence seems to suggest that human memory may be an even more complex affair than we have so far imagined.

Non-brain cells store memories, too

In November 2024, a team of researchers from the Center for Neural Science at New York University (NYU) published a paper in Nature CommunicationsTrusted Source showing that nerve tissue and kidney tissue cells also store a kind of memory.

Speaking to Medical News Today, lead author Nikolay Kukushkin, DPhil, clinical associate professor of life science at NYU, told us that his “lab has been interested in memory at its most basic level for many years.”

“In the past, we studied sea slugs because they form very simple memories, allowing us to get to the bottom of how they form. What we have done now is to find an even simpler memory, which is common not just across different animals, but across all cell types,” Kukushkin explains of his team’s new study.

“What we were hoping to find […] is that generic cells of the body do not just have ‘memory,’ they have memory. It’s fully literal. […] [O]ur study shows that it’s not just a metaphorical connection — it is the same mechanism that retains information in brain cells and in kidney cells (same cellular tools), and it follows the same rules — namely, the spacing effect, the fact that experiences separated in time produce a stronger memory than the same amount of experience crammed in one go.”
— Nikolay Kukushkin, DPhil

The “spacing effect” refers to a phenomenon whereby learning, or the creation of a memory, occurs more effectively when information, or exposure to a stimulus, is spaced out.

In their study, Kukushkin and his team tested the formation of memories in laboratory experiments on two types of human non-brain cells: cells collected from nerve tissue and cells collected from kidney tissue.

They exposed both of these types of cells to chemical signals in a spaced-out pattern mimicking the way in which brain cells learn through exposure to such chemical information via neurotransmitters, or chemical messengers.

The researchers found that, much like brain cells, these other types of cells responded to the chemical signals by switching on a gene associated with memory storage.

This suggests that, like brain cells, other cells in the human body also accumulate memories.

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What types of memories might non-brain cells store?

The question that then arises is: What kinds of memories might cells around the body store? That, Kukushkin told us, “is a critical point.”

“Every system memorizes what it experiences — a sea slug memorizes sea slug things, a human memorizes human things, a kidney cell memorizes kidney cell things,” he explained, also referencing previous research on memory formation conducted on Californian sea slugs.

“We are not saying, as some people seem to imagine, that ‘mind’ memories (emotions, knowledge, skills) are stored in kidneys,” the researcher clarified. “Those things are still processed in the brain, and in the brain they are stored. But other cells have their own experiences.”

According to Kukushkin, the memories stored in non-brain cells in other parts of the body are memories strictly related to the roles that those specific cells play in human health.

Thus, he detailed:

“A kidney cell might be exposed to different patterns of salts, fluids, nutrients; based on those patterns, it might change how it acts in the future. One known example of this kind of memory is what happens to pancreatic cells when they are exposed to a large amount of sugar. In response, they release into the bloodstream a pulse of insulin, a hormone that promotes sugar absorption. This pulse reaches a certain peak, and then fades away. But wait 20 minutes and repeat the sugar load — now the pulse of insulin becomes twice as big.”
— Nikolay Kukushkin, DPhil

“You can see why that would be useful,” said Kukushkin, “if your sugar-absorbing capacity has been maxed out, you should increase it to make sure you don’t waste any nutrients.”

“But if you had it permanently increased, you’d probably be fatigued and hungry all the time. So adding a memory element into the pancreatic cell helps it adapt to the patterns of nutrients, just as ‘mind’ memories help us adapt to the patterns of experience,” he hypothesized.

What implications does body memory have for human health?

While Kukushkin said the recent study conducted by him and his collaborators “is a proof of principle,” other recent research more clearly shows how memories stored in other parts of the body than the brain could affect health outcomes in practice.

A study published in November 2024 in NatureTrusted Source found that adipose (fat) tissue cells retain a memory of obesity even after weight loss, which could contribute to the yo-yo weight loss effect, whereby a person regains that shed wight fairly rapidly.

The study, conducted by researchers from ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, supports the notion that lifestyle factors, such as unhealthy dietary patterns that can lead to chronic conditions like obesity, can trigger epigenetic memory formation by switching on genes that were not previously expressed.

Ferdinand von Meyenn, PhD, professor of nutrition and metabolic epigenetics at ETH Zurich, and one of the lead authors of this study, told MNT that “this project stemmed from [the team’s] curiosity about whether cells retain an epigenetic memory of prior metabolic states.”

“Epigenetic memory is well-known for explaining how daughter-cells maintain their transcriptional identity through cell division, playing a vital role in development, regeneration, and growth. But what about nondividing cells? They too must adapt to external stimuli and therefore undergo epigenetic adaptations,” he noted.

Through this study, von Meyenn and his colleagues wanted to figure out if a chronic condition like obesity would change the way in which adipose tissue reacts to external factors and, if so, if those changes were permanent or reversible.