A reading of Quanta’s recent piece on aneural cellular behavior
The July 30 article in Quanta, What Can a Cell Remember?, reports on a striking experimental finding: kidney cells grown in a dish appear to “anticipate” regularly spaced pulses of chemical signals. When the pulses are paused and then resumed, the cells respond differently—suggesting, at first glance, that they “remember” what came before.
It’s a compelling observation. But the interpretation it invites—framed in terms of “memory”—raises some interesting questions about how we make sense of biological systems, especially in an era where cognitive metaphors are everywhere.
Framing the puzzle
It’s tempting to treat any history-dependent behaviour as a form of memory. The cells, after all, are responding in a way that depends on what happened previously. But is that enough to justify the label?
Here’s where it gets tricky. In everyday language—and often in scientific discourse—“memory” implies more than just a state that reflects past inputs. It often carries connotations of storage, retrieval, even something like representation. When a person remembers, we imagine a record being accessed. When an organism remembers, we often imagine some inner model being updated.
But what’s actually going on in these cells?
The evidence suggests a change in internal state—likely biochemical or structural—based on the temporal pattern of stimulation. There’s no evidence of discrete traces or symbolic encoding. Just a shift in how the system behaves next, shaped by what it’s been through.
Whether that counts as “memory” depends less on the biology than on how one chooses to draw conceptual boundaries.
Historical echoes
This isn’t a new dynamic. Scientific explanation often leans on metaphor. Genes are “selfish.” Markets “want” equilibrium. Cells “remember.” These analogies can clarify, but they also smuggle in assumptions—about agency, intention, even consciousness.
We’ve seen this before. Early models of the atom borrowed imagery from solar systems. Early AI borrowed from the brain. Now we see biology borrowing from cognition. Each move reflects the limits of available conceptual tools as much as the systems being described.
That doesn’t make these metaphors wrong. But it does mean we should treat them as frames, not facts.
An alternative reading
If we set the metaphor aside, one possible interpretation is this:
The cell behaves like a dynamic system whose future trajectories are conditioned by past inputs. What looks like memory may be nothing more (or less) than the unfolding of state-dependent behavior over time.
This reframing doesn’t diminish the insight. In fact, it may open up richer explanatory pathways—from systems theory, from control engineering, from thermodynamics. It invites us to ask not just what the cell remembers, but how it changes, and under what conditions that change matters.
It also nudges us away from anthropomorphic projection and toward a more grounded—if less tidy—view of adaptation.
Why this matters
None of this is to police terminology. But how we name things shapes how we study them. If we label all adaptive behavior as “memory,” we risk flattening distinctions that could turn out to be important—between structural plasticity and symbolic storage, between time-sensitive feedback and active recall.
There’s no consensus on where the line should be drawn. That’s not a flaw—it’s a feature of doing science in a world without a single epistemic centre.
So this note doesn’t aim to close the case. It’s an invitation: to revisit how we think about memory, metaphor, and the stories we tell about intelligence—whether in people, machines, or single cells in a dish.