Memory is not just in the brain.

Many of you have heard of the book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk. The main idea of the book is that memory is not just something contained in the brain, but that the actual cells and tissues of our body store our past experiences. 

This  body-stored memory can often affect our current life in ways that we may not necessarily understand or be conscious of. Niko's work is bringing a new understanding and validation to this idea on a cellular and molecular level. 

“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." (Kukushkin, 2024) 

 





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What does the existence of such cellular memories mean for everyday life?

This is still a new frontier, but it does bring a lot of validation to the idea from books like the Body Keeps the Score that what we experience, such as trauma -  could be indeed stored as memory that is spread out throughout the body and outside of the brain.  Research shows that non-brain cells have memory, and this memory could potentially store such changes.

For example, cells in the pancreas respond to sugar in the blood by releasing the hormone insulin, which causes sugar to be absorbed. If you expose those cells to a large amount of sugar at once, then wait twenty minutes and do it again, the second time they will release twice as much insulin as the first time (O-Connor, 1980) . 

As Nikkolay asserts, this makes biological sense: it is the body’s way of predicting that more sugar is on its way, and it needs to prepare for this by increasing its sugar-absorbing ability - even before the sugar arrives (Kukushkin, 2025a). 

Another example is that bones become stronger the more they are repeatedly bent.  They detect and then predict mechanical load, and then respond to this pattern by increasing bone formation (Turner 1994). 





This pattern detection from your cells means that things we do leave an imprint on the body (whether we realize it or not). 

The gap between your lunch and your dinner. The number of days you did exercise this week. The frequency with which you expose your mind to social media.  Our brain-body detects patterns. What we expose ourselves to is a data point for the cells of our brain and body to potentially store and then even respond with a prediction (Kukushkin, 2025a).

 



Memory is not limitless, however.  Unlike computers, we can't just 'add more storage'.

Once our memory capacities fill up, the only way to create more is to wait (and sleep).

As Nikolay states in a Pyschology Today article (2025b):

“We need to recognize that brains do not have an infinite capacity—that, in fact, it is very easy to run low on storage. That does not abruptly cut off our ability to learn, but it does gradually degrade the quality and strength of memories we are able to form.

You have likely experienced that ‘feeling’ or knowing that after a class, or learning something new, you might find it harder to memorize anything new immediately after.  After immersing yourself in social media or information, you might also find that your brain is not up to learning or remembering new information as sharply or as well as it would have been before consuming loads of data. 

 

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