Throughout history, man has exploited matter to carry out tasks well beyond his biological constraints. Starting from primitive tools with functionality solely derived from shape and structure, we have moved on to responsive matter that can change its properties upon external stimulus and even further to adaptive matter that can change its response depending on the environment. One of the grand scientific and intellectual challenges is to make matter that can actually learn. Such matter’s behavior would not only depend on the here and now, but also on its past. It would have memory, and ultimately autonomously interact with its environment and self-regulate its action. We may call such matter ‘cognitive’ or even ‘intelligent’. Here we introduce a number of experiments on disordered nanomaterial systems, where we make use of “material learning” to realize functionality.