Studies show memories in offspring may be impacted by parental experiences

steve001

Member
Taken together, the studies indicate that there is a lot more to be learned about how memory works in mammals and that much more work needs to be done to gain a better understanding of it and perhaps use what is learned to treat memory disorders or phobias.

It reminds me of a friend of mine that has a sever case of Dendrophobia. She always believed her fear of trees arose from a past life. It's nice to know there could be a prosaic explanation.
The article:
(Medical Xpress)—Two new studies suggest that events that transpire during the life of a mouse may have an impact on memory mechanics in their offspring. Both studies were conducted by teams in the U.S. and both have had their findings published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
In the first study, the research team found that mice that were taught to experience fear in conjunction with a certain odor, passed that fear on to their offspring—they too experienced fear when smelling that odor. Further research revealed that the fear factor was passed by the father's through their sperm. In the second study, the research team found that mice that lacked a certain protein in their breast milk, produced offspring that had a far greater capacity for learning new things and remembering them.
The first study has opened the door to a possible explanation of phobias in animals, including humans. If a man has a particularly unpleasant experience with a spider, for example, he may unknowingly experience a change in his genes that are passed on to his offspring, which cause them to fear spiders, seemingly without good reason. To learn this, lab mice were given foot shocks when experiencing the scent of a certain flower teaching them to experience fear when smelling it. Subsequent offspring exhibited a similar fear upon smelling the odor, despite not even being conceived when the initial event occurred. A closer look revealed that the DNA of the mice wasn't changed, just markers related to memory. The researchers found that the offspring produced a third generation of mice that also feared the smell, indicating just how dramatic a single event can be.

The second study involved studying the breast milk of mice and cognitive and memory skills of their offspring. The researchers found that if a protein called tumor necrosis factor (TNF) is missing in female mice, the breast milk they provide their offspring leads to larger than normal hippocampus' and because of that pups that are better at making their way through a maze, and then later remembering how they did it. TNF is normally present in mammals as part of the immune system—they cause cytokines to be produced which are immune response triggers. The researchers are not able to explain how or why the pups would have greater cognitive abilities at the expense of a healthy immune system, but note that nature likely has a reason for it.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-12-memories-offspring-impacted-parental.html

Second article. You must create an account.
Maternal hematopoietic TNF, via milk chemokines, programs hippocampal development and memory http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3596.html
 
The researchers are not able to explain how or why the pups would have greater cognitive abilities at the expense of a healthy immune system, but note that nature likely has a reason for it.

I wonder if the researchers actually phrased it like that?

If the effect is real, it's not going to be a true "why" so much as a "how", although a ubiquitous and survival-effective "how" will function in a way that appears to perfectly emulate a "why."

My wild, fairly uneducated guess would be that a mouse with super-excellent navigation skills might be more inclined to wander or explore and thus encounter a toxic or pathogenic immunological challenge that leads to death often enough to create a selective-disadvantage in the population residing in the habitat. Something like that. Reduced hippocampal function might provide some other behavioral advantage in particular environments that nobody's picked up on yet (since studying mouse cognition manifesting as behavior must be difficult.)
 
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Very interesting Steve. I echo the "huh? Why TNF?" part. :)

Linda
The first article mentions TNF. The second article goes into greater detail on lack of TNF's role in hippocampal development and memory. Suffice it to say, both articles offer possible plausible physical avenues of brain inheritances.
 
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Anomalous information transfer?! Deception-cons, roll out! Randi-tron, wisebot, and pinkerbee, obfuscate!
 
The researchers found that the offspring produced a third generation of mice that also feared the smell, indicating just how dramatic a single event can be.

I would be interested to know if they also had seperate mice in a nearby enclosure who were not given the shock treatment... and if they also had offspring that did not show the same fear.

If they haven't done this... then they haven't ruled out Morphic Resonance as a possibility.
 
No Dias & Ressler's paper hasn't ruled out field type effects like Morphic Resonance, they didn't really test for them.

They did find specific epigenetic changes within the sperm itself which appear associated with the changes in first and second generation offspring, but it's conceivable that these changes could be caused by field effects, who knows?

Certainly very interesting stuff, the most intriguing aspect to me is that the First-Generation-IVF offspring exhibit consistently smaller neuroanatomical changes, than even Second-Generation-natural-conception offspring.

They didn't carry out any behavioral studies with the IVF offspring unlike Eric Nestler's paper, but on the surface the reduced neuroanatomical changes in IVF offspring they report seem similar to results from Nestler et. al. (2011).

Nestler’s only potential explanation is that the IVF process itself, inadvertently selected immature sperm, leading to reduced inheritance effects, and that seems a reasonable idea to me. Dias & Ressler's paper doesn't even mention that they found consistently reduced neuroanatomical changes in IVF offspring.

In both papers the IVF fathers were killed to extract sperm, so these fathers were dead, long before the IVF offspring were even conceived, this is not mentioned in either paper as the authors don't see the relevance. This certainly leaves the door open, as to what is responsible for the reduced inheritance effect seen only in IVF offspring. It could be the IVF process, and/or it could be the dead IVF fathers in my view.

It would be great to run an experiment investigating inheritance effects from living IVF fathers, compared to dead IVF fathers, using a single different method of sperm harvesting which initially at least, kept all the fathers alive during extraction.

If we still saw a reduced inheritance effect in offspring from dead IVF fathers, when compared with offspring from living IVF fathers, heck, it would turn biology, and other subjects on their head. If we didn't see any difference we would still learn something really important too.
 
I don't have access to the full text, I don't think...but, could something like maternal oxytocin releases during natural conception (contrasted with cortisol releases during lab mouse-IVF) account for any of it?
 
This has always been an "of course it is so"-issue by me. Just like the continental drift. How animals without any parents, or same species, nearby yet start up complex hunting behaviour for example. Instinct is a poorly description of this issue.

One thing that is also interesting with this research is the perceived memories or behaviour by the receiver, from the giver, in an organ-transplant. Cell memory.
 
One thing that is also interesting with this research is the perceived memories or behaviour by the receiver, from the giver, in an organ-transplant. Cell memory.

Yes, I've heard of this before, although I've never investigated it. I seem to recall reading about a young heart donor who and died in a road accident, and had a well known craving/addition for a particularly specific food. The recipient of his heart, who previously had no interest in this particular food, found that they began to have cravings for this food themselves over time. This is all from memory so it might be wrong, but certainly interesting to consider.
 
I would be interested to know if they also had seperate mice in a nearby enclosure who were not given the shock treatment... and if they also had offspring that did not show the same fear.

If they haven't done this... then they haven't ruled out Morphic Resonance as a possibility.
There was a time when Sheldrake did not have an explanation, but needed one so he invented morphic resonance. But imagine if the research in this article plus others that I've linked to previously was available to him those many years ago. Would he have still invented morphic resonance as the explanation? One can only wonder.
 
There was a time when Sheldrake did not have an explanation, but needed one so he invented morphic resonance. But imagine if the research in this article plus others that I've linked to previously was available to him those many years ago. Would he have still invented morphic resonance as the explanation? One can only wonder.

Sheldrake is a trained biologist who was director of studies for a time at Cambridge University, so I very much doubt if he would be fooled so easily! The interesting thing is that a lot of research showing genetic transmission of this sort was scorned until a mechanism was discovered.

There are a variety of discovered/proposed mechanisms for epigenetic transmission (which Sheldrake himself discusses in his books) - for example a process in which small groups (methyl and acetyl) get added to DNA. This alters the extent to which it is transcribed, but eventually these groups come off - so no long term change to the DNA results.

Sheldrake really does have evidence for morphic resonance, and it may well be that such experiments as these should control for morphogenetic effects.

David
 
There was a time when Sheldrake did not have an explanation, but needed one so he invented morphic resonance.

Yes. That's called Science. You observe... come up with a hypothesis and then test for it....and in the case of Morphic Resonance he has evidence to back it up.

But imagine if the research in this article plus others that I've linked to previously was available to him those many years ago. Would he have still invented morphic resonance as the explanation? One can only wonder.

Well if you only practice Science based on pre-conceived ideologies then probably not. Thankfully Rupert spent a fair portion of his professional life as a Biologist in India where they practice Eastern medicine and philosophy..... so he has had exposure to both.

I would say he would definitely still have looked at Morphic Resonance as a possibility...especially given that it was the behaviour of plants that was one of the main reasons he started looking at Morphic Resonance. The study above doesn't explain that yet.
 
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