THEY turn out to be smarter than anyone thought: sperm can remember the twists and turns they’ve made.
If human sperm turn in one direction, they’ll turn in the opposite direction at the next opportunity, Peter Brugger, a neurobiologist at University Hospital, Zurich, has found. “It’s certainly not cognitive memory,” he says. But they must have some kind of memory.
This kind of behaviour, known as spontaneous alternation behaviour, is found in a wide range of creatures. To see whether human sperm cells exhibit it, Brugger recorded which way 714 healthy sperm cells turned when confronted with a left or…
