Can You Inherit Your Grandmother’s Memories?

In another blog, I talked about inheriting trauma. Experiences of our ancestors can shape our resilience to stress, predispose us to be more anxious or depressed. Prisoner of war camps during the US Civil War were known to have terrible living conditions and, to no one’s surprise, the experience of being in one of those would have scarred people for life, leading to poorer health and shorter lifespan. This is something that’s intuitive and even logical to expect. But more than that, the sons and even grandsons of these prisoners had worse health outcomes than their peers, despite not having experienced those adversities directly – hearing someone’s story isn’t the same as experiencing the trauma directly, no matter how we react to it. Somehow, however, they appear to have been influenced by the trauma of their ancestors.

Similar research shows that the survivors of the Dutch Famine left a mark on the health of their descendants. In a previous blog that dealt with this topic, I talked about Rachel Yehuda’s pioneering research on Holocaust survivors too.

It’s quite a fascinating idea, that you’re not only shaped by your own experiences and your relationships or socio-economic circumstances, but that you could be shaped by hardships experienced by your ancestors, some you might not even know about. Furthermore, it appears that you could even inherit your ancestors’ memories. In his book It Didn't Start with You, Mark Wolynn gives us several highly impactful clinical examples where his clients experienced symptoms (nightmares, phobias, etc.) that directly mirrored the trauma experienced by their ancestors. Here’s the catch, though – they didn’t know about these traumatic events!

Science isn’t as hostile to these seemingly impossible ideas. In fact, some research is already underway and some studies have been published. A lot remains to be done and if we are being honest, we don’t know much for certain. But what we know is worth presenting and explaining.

How is this possible?

I’m not going to invoke C. G. Jung’s collective unconscious or any other spiritual explanation, although there are plenty of those out there, some even interesting. I do understand Jungian psychology to a degree and I don’t see how it adequately explains this phenomenon, even though I’ve come across quite a few texts and videos online that connect the two. I argue that Jungian psychology introduces a few very interesting important ideas into psychological discourse, but overall, its explanatory power isn’t that great. Because it can be stretched to explain nearly everything, that alone should make you suspicious. Nothing is that comprehensive. Often, it ends up being diluted and too vague to be useful.

My beloved constructivism has nothing to say on this – at least to the best of my knowledge.

So let’s stick with science on this one.

Since we can’t pass on our lived experience because it doesn’t directly alter our DNA, the answer must be in a different form of transmission - one that scientists call epigenetics. Whenever I think of epigenetics and the research done in that area in the past few decades, I can’t help but think of Lamarck, whose ideas about how evolution works included the notion that lived experience could somehow be transmitted from parents to their offsprings. He was laughed at for this belief, and here we are, over a century after his death, validating some of his ideas. Even though many more of his ideas remain unconfirmed and in opposition to evidence, it is a nice vindication for a very interesting thinker. (I always have sympathies for the outsiders and those that go against the grain even when their ideas border on cooky. Historical experience teaches us that what’s weird yesterday becomes accepted today.)

We all know about DNA and how DNA is passed on biologically. At least once or twice a day a client is likely to invoke their own version of genetics to explain a problem they have, with the usual subtext – „oh well, it’s my genes so there’s nothing I can do about it“.

Our tendency to declare things genetic and thus immutable when we don’t find it convenient to take responsibility for them aside, the basic principle is well known. You get half of your genetic material from each parent. In total, it appears that we have around 25 000 genes in our genome, and they are all tightly packed thanks to the way in which they are folded around proteins that we call histones. An average DNA strand is about 5ft long and is so tightly wound that it fits into one small compartment of a cell. Nature is sometimes so sloppy and then at other times so neat and organized that you can’t help but be in awe! Compared to other species, 25 000 genes aren’t too much, but even these genes don’t have to be active at the same time (just imagine the logistic mess!) so they become activated or deactivated as needed and this is done using different ways of chemical tagging.         

The study of how genes are activated and inactivated and how these patterns transfer from parent to offspring is called epigenetics. By placing epigenetic codes on parts of our DNA, we can deactivate a gene without having to remove it from our genome. It’s like a biological equivalent of a switch that you turn on or off. Gene activation and deactivation happens normally as we go through our lives in response to different demands our environment puts on us. This ability allows us to adapt better.

When children inherit the genetic material from their parents, these tags aren’t always copied verbatim and in a way you can make the case that most of them are „reset“. A gene may have been activated in a parent, but it doesn’t mean that it will be so in the offspring. And if you think about it, it makes sense – different people will have different needs and live in different environments, which requires specific gene regulation for each person. However, research shows that some tags could escape this reset between generations, and that seems to be true of the tags that have to do with memory. A proposed mechanism involves histones, proteins around which DNA is wrapped, although the exact mechanics aren’t known yet.

The Magic of Cherry Blossom

Scientists have put this theory to the test. They exposed mice to the smell of cherry blossom and delivered an electric shock. The mice made the connection between the two and learned rather quickly to associate cherry blossom with pain. Later on, smelling cherry blossom even without delivering an electric shock was sufficient to induce a response from them.

As expected, the mice offspring showed the same panicked response to the smell of cherry blossom when they had never been exposed to it previously. In fact, this response got passed on to yet another generation in some of the mice! It seems that intense and painful experiences get passed on and avoid the “reset” I mentioned previously. Scientists were able to link this to changes in the epigenetic tags between mice who had been exposed to cherry blossom and those who hadn’t.

Knowing Without Having Learned

A blog in the Scientific American talks about savants, people that, according to Donald Treffert, know things they clearly never learned. He talks about a rather well known case of Alonzo Clemons, a sculptor from Colorado who began sculpting after sustaining a brain injury, without having had an art lesson in his life prior to that.