A new study from New York University (USA) shows that cells outside the brain also have the ability to learn and form memories.
Associate Professor Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications, stated that the ability of cells outside the brain to learn and form memories has been confirmed through a special experiment.
The authors replicated the process of learning over time by studying two types of human cells that are not brain cells in the laboratory: one type from neural tissue and the other from kidney tissue.
A stage in the groundbreaking experiment aimed at demonstrating that every cell in the body has the ability to learn and form memories – (Photo: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY).
The cells in the experiment were exposed to various chemical signal patterns, similar to how brain cells interact with neurotransmitter patterns when we learn new information.
In response, the non-brain cells were expected to activate the “memory gene”, which is the type of gene that brain cells activate when they detect a pattern in information and restructure connections to form memories.
To monitor this, the scientists created a type of fluorescent protein in these non-brain cells, which helped indicate when the “memory gene” was active or inactive.
The results showed that these cells could identify the timing of chemical pulses, mimicking the bursts of neurotransmitters in the brain.
This process was also repeated rather than prolonged, just as neurons in the brain can register moments of learning with breaks, rather than cramming all knowledge at once.
“This indicates that the ability to learn from spaced repetition is not exclusive to brain cells; in fact, it may be a fundamental characteristic of all cells” – stated Associate Professor Kukushkin, as reported by Medical Xpress.
According to the authors, this discovery not only opens a new door to understanding how memory works but could also lead to better methods for enhancing learning abilities and treating memory issues as well as other types of diseases.
Associate Professor Kukushkin believes that in the future, we will need to treat the body more like the brain.
“For example, consider how our pancreas remembers our past eating habits to maintain healthy blood sugar levels, or how cancer cells remember what happens during chemotherapy” – he explained.
