Unraveling the Mystery of Memory: A Scientific and Philosophical Exploration

As I reflect on a year ofQuantabiology stories to decide which of the many excellent ones to recommend, I am relying on memory. But what exactly does that mean? “Memory” is a slippery word. It means one thing to a person striving to recall places, people or moments from the past, and another to someone searching their mind for a fact they swore they knew. A neuroscientist might consider a “memory” to be a physical connection between neurons or networks reactivated by cognitive processes, or the changes in an animal’s behavior in response to something it experienced in the past. But what is memory to a cell biologist — or to a cell? This is what the writer Claire L. Evans explored inher scientific, philosophical, semantic journeythrough the long-forgotten and recently revived history of aneural, or brainless, forms of memory. She recounts decades-old and brand-new experiments that test whether individual cells record experiences, such as pulses of chemicals in their environments. In the process, these experiments challenge fundamental ideas in neuroscience. For a cell, Evans writes, “there’s no distinction between memory, the memorizer and the act of remembering.” Is that also true for us? Here are some more stories from 2025 that I think are worth remembering.