Your brain isn’t just powered by sugar—it may store your memories in it.

Not the kind you stir into your coffee, but glycans—complex sugar molecules that attach to proteins and lipids throughout the body, including in the brain. For years, these sugar chains were overlooked, dismissed as structural decorations. Now, scientists believe they might be doing something far more profound.

In recent studies, glycans have been linked to how memories are stored and maintained. They seem to act like chemical tags, helping identify which synapses to keep and which to prune. Think of them as tiny bookmarks marking the pages of your mental story.

This field—glycobiology—is still young, but researchers are beginning to see just how crucial these sugar molecules might be to learning, memory, and even neurodegenerative diseases.

We may one day find that long-term memory is not just electrical and chemical—but also sweetly encoded in sugar.