Evidence has been found that kidney cells have their own memories. Science journalist Tibi Puiu reports at ZME Science,

When exposed to signals that mimic the rhythms of learning, these cells behaved much like neurons. Their responses strengthened when stimulation was spaced out over time rather than delivered all at once.

“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,” said Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study. The findings suggest that learning could be a fundamental property of life itself, built into the way all cells process time and information.

“Scientists Found That Memory Can Happen Outside The Brain,” October 14, 2025

Actually, it makes sense. What if the brain is having issues — a seizure or blow to the skull, for example? If the kidneys store some information that pertains to their continuing to function as kidneys, they can wait for the brain to catch up.

From the paper:

Our findings show that canonical features of memory do not necessarily depend on neural circuitry, but can be embedded in the dynamics of signaling cascades conserved across different cell types.

Kukushkin, N.V., Carney, R.E., Tabassum, T. et al. The massed-spaced learning effect in non-neural human cells. Nat Commun 15, 9635 (2024). The paper is open access. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53922-x

Kukushkin et al. have a rather different philosophy of biology than we would expect to find in, say, textbook Darwinism:

If true, this means that memory might not require a brain at all. Instead, it could be a universal biological process — a way for cells to detect and store temporal patterns in their environment, whether that environment is a neural network or a bloodstream.

“In the future, we will need to treat our body more like the brain,” Kukushkin said. “For example, consider what our pancreas remembers about the pattern of our past meals to maintain healthy levels of blood glucose — or consider what a cancer cell remembers about the pattern of chemotherapy.”

That concept could reshape medicine.” “Outside The Brain,”

Reshape medicine indeed. All life has memory? Recall that prominent neuroscientist Christof Koch got dinged recently for flirting with panpsychism (all living things are conscious).

Bt it is very difficult to look at the natural world seriously and not see a mind in there somewhere. Increasingly, we work with what we know and struggle with what we are commanded to believe.