Our Memory Also Resides Within the Body

A paper I recently encountered resonated strongly with an intuition I have had for a long time. Scientific research is not always about discovering something completely new. Sometimes it gives measurable form to something we have already sensed, imperfectly, from within.

The study suggests that the canonical features of memory do not necessarily depend on neural circuitry, implying that memory may also be linked to the cells of the body. Yet, this does not mean that a kidney cell remembers a childhood or carries a forgotten emotion. The study uses “memory” in a much simpler sense: a past event changes how the cell responds later. That narrower finding is already profound to me. A trace of the past can remain in the body without becoming a thought.

Are we just our brains?

Is the brain itself who we are? Is what the brain represents truly the self?

I have a more holistic view. What we call ourselves is not a static object located inside the skull. We emerge through the continuous interaction among the environment, the brain, and the body. The brain matters enormously, but it never works alone. The world changes the brain through the body, and the brain changes how the body meets the world. The vectors are accumulated from every direction.

We often picture movement as the brain sending a command and the body obeying. In reality, even a simple movement is an ongoing conversation. The spinal cord helps adjust posture, reflexes, and repeated movements while sensory information keeps flowing back from the body. The gut also communicates continuously with the brain and can influence how we feel and act. This does not make the gut a second brain with its own personal memories. It simply means that thought and action do not happen in a brain sealed off from the rest of us.

I am tempted to say that our experiences and lives are woven into every spinal neuron and every cell. Science cannot yet support that sentence literally. But experience clearly leaves changes throughout a living system, and not all of those changes are the kind of conscious memory we can describe in words. The body is not passive matter waiting for the brain to give it meaning.

A Sixth Sense: Interoception

Vision and hearing tell us about the world outside. Interoception is our sense of what is happening inside: our heartbeat, breathing, hunger, fullness, temperature, pain, and other changes in the body. Much of it happens without our awareness, but it quietly shapes how each moment feels.

We are also getting better at observing this inner conversation. Electrogastrography (EGG) records the stomach’s electrical rhythms, while ingestible sensors and newer imaging methods let researchers study the gut in motion. These tools are beginning to show that the inside of the body is not just background noise.

What fascinates me most is timing. The same image can be processed a little differently depending on when it appears within a heartbeat, especially when it carries emotional meaning. The brain also has rhythms of its own, including beta oscillations, that create changing moments of greater or lesser receptivity. None of these rhythms controls the mind by itself. But they suggest that information never arrives in a neutral, timeless brain. It arrives in a living body, at a particular moment.

Remembering may also depend partly on this inner context. An external cue matters, but so may the state of the body when we encounter it. The body and brain perceive together. Instead of asking how an external stimulus enters an isolated brain, we can ask how an organism in a particular bodily state becomes receptive to that stimulus at a particular moment.

Seeing things as it is.

There is a simple contemplative practice of moving attention through the body and observing sensations as they are: between the toes, along the sides of the body, at the top of the head, or around the philtrum. Its core is not to construct another image of the self, but to notice the continuous sensory processes from which that image is made.

Philosophically, this feels like trying to encounter the self as the noumenon itself rather than as a fixed representation or concept. We may never step completely outside representation. Still, the practice reveals an interesting difference: the self in my head feels stable, while the self I observe in the body is always changing through pressure, temperature, tension, vibration, pulse, and breath.

I once imagined this body scanning as something like dropout in a neural network. Instead of following only its usual paths, attention visits places it normally ignores. I still like the image, but only as a metaphor. We do not know that body scanning randomly activates neurons or erases and creates pathways like a machine-learning algorithm. What seems more plausible is simpler: with practice, we may learn to notice different signals and respond to them differently. Perhaps, over time, our neural circuits become more robust, just as regularization methods for neural networks.

Paying attention to a sensation does not let us read a memory stored inside a cell. But it may let us notice how the past is expressed in the present: as tension, a quickened pulse, a familiar discomfort, or an automatic response. The body’s past is not revealed as a hidden movie. It appears in what the body is prepared to feel and do now.

Memory beyond a hippocampus and neocortex

The cellular study does not explain contemplative experience. But it does challenge an assumption that every memory-like process must begin in a neural circuit. Living things hold on to parts of their history in many ways. Cells change. Neural and bodily systems adapt. The whole organism meets the next moment shaped by what came before.

This does not make the brain less important. It makes the boundary around the brain less absolute.

Perhaps the self is not the brain, the body, or the environment considered separately. Perhaps it is the continuously changing relationship among them. Looking at the mysteries of the human body and the universe, I am often struck by how scientific measurements can align with inner intuition while also correcting it. The alignment fills me with awe;

That, to me, is one of the most beautiful roles of science. It does not merely confirm what we feel. It teaches us how to preserve the depth of an intuition without claiming more than nature has shown.

Further reading

• Kukushkin et al., The massed-spaced learning effect in non-neural human cells, Nature Communications (2024).