New Research on Biological Memory + Entropy never sleeps

What exactly is memory? Where and how does it take place in living things? New research suggests that all individual cells have a type of memory. Therefore, memory appears to be multidimensional in biology: occurring not only in networks of neurons as previously thought, but in individual non-neural cells as well. Somehow memory seems to be a characteristic of all cells.

“When it comes to survival, what a cell knows of itself isn’t as important as what it knows of the world: how it incorporates information about its experiences to determine when to bend, when to battle, and when to make a break for it. A cell preserves the information that preserves its existence. And in a sense, so do we.”

“A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is ... fundamentally challenging what memory is.”

Let’s read a review of this research by Claire L. Evans in Quanta Magazine:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-cell-remember-20250730/

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So what does entropy have to do with memory? Well, if we pull back to a more abstract physics/cosmology perspective, we could say that memory of any type can be expressed as retention of information through time (required for any & every kind of complexity/structure, regardless of material). Since the Big Bang the universe has been composed of rising & falling collections of information. Also since the Big Bang, entropy has been steadily breaking up these knots of information, and will continue to do so till the end of time. Life, and all forms of life including us, can be seen as temporary struggles against this process of entropy. Biological life depends on and is characterized by the retention of information through time, and in this sense memory is a sine qua non for life on earth.

And in a closer-to-home dimension, there are the issues of human cultural and personal memory. We can discuss any of these angles that people might be interested in (or others).

~Michael