Neuroscience and Beyond · Neuroscience and Beyond

What If Every Cell Has a Memory? From Cells to Consciousness | Prof. Nikolay Kukushkin

·1 hr 18 min·4 clips

Kidney cells showed the same mass-spaced effect that memory studies usually see in brains.

Svilan opens the episode by welcoming listeners back to Neuroscience and Beyond. He frames the discussion around a simple but unsettling idea: memory may not belong exclusively to the brain. Professor Nikolai Kokushkin joins the show as a biochemist and neuroscientist. He argues that memory-like processes may be a universal property of cells. The conversation starts with sea slugs and then shifts to human kidney cells. Kokushkin explains that cells can retain information from experience and that this stored information can shape later behavior. Neurons can do the same thing, but neurons also change specific connections with other cells. That gives the brain more room to work with and more states in which to store information. The show treats memory as layered rather than singular. Some of it happens inside individual cells. Some of it lives in the wiring between them. The host then asks what sea slugs can tell us about memory in animals with much larger nervous systems. Kokushkin answers by going evolutionary. He traces sea slugs and humans back to a shared worm-like ancestor that lived about 600 to 800 million years ago. From there, the lineages diverged. What stayed similar was the basic structure of neurons and the ways they respond to timing patterns, genes, and molecules. What changed was the circuitry built from those neurons. The episode uses that contrast to separate shared cellular machinery from the abstractions built on top of it. It closes by widening the frame again. The conversation connects memory to disease, intelligence, and consciousness, and ends on a reflective note about meaning, suggesting that even if life has no single purpose, there is meaning in every part of it.

As heard by us

A measured look at memory, from cells to the larger questions around disease, intelligence, and consciousness.

Professor Nikolai Kokushkin steers the conversation from sea slugs to human kidney cells and into the question of whether memory-like processes reach beyond neurons.

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If you want a path from cells to consciousness, start here.

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