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- Hacker News
- When our Little, Stuart falls down we don’t even know what he remembers. [in mice]by nemosaltat
- These pop-sci articles annoy me greatly. All I can think reading the title is “well, duh?” - they’re a complete tautology.
Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.
If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.
This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”
by sph - This article talks about a finding related to SETD7. This has implications for new treatments.by neuralkoi
- > Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it.
That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.
by hamper653 - We do all know experience has its substrate, but one thing matters more—are they encoded as stubborn neural connections, mitochondrial damage, epigenetic marks, or something else to transform it into depression, long-term inflammation, or stress susceptibility, etc.? The current evidence emphasizes epigenetics. Only if we know what the 'it' is, do we have chance to change, rather than just knowing it exists.by Byte-Naut
- > if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it
Yes, and it (or at least one of them) has now been found. Maybe you don't care about knowledge for its own sake, but as the "irritating" press release goes on to point out,
“There are currently no treatments for what early-life stress does to the brain, partially because we have not had a clear picture of what molecular mechanisms to target,” Peña said. “This work is exciting because it reveals a clear mechanism, and also helps explain why the impact of stress is both latent and broad.
by T-A - Scar is also a very loaded word to use here for something that is not a scar.by mattmcknight
- Then my brain must be full of scars.by jdw64
- In mice.by ls612
- Are you a man or a mouse?by LightBug1
- Inmiced above.by dang
- "In mice" is the right caveat for outcomes and the wrong one for mechanisms. Nobody’s selling you a drug here--they’re describing a chromatin change, and that’s the part rodents are actually good for.
The alternative study design is randomizing infants to early-life stress and biopsying their hippocampi at 30. Committee’s still reviewing it.
by leoh - I remember having it drilled into me in High School that unless you did well on your finals:
1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted. 2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career. 3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards.
Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.
by redrix - Exam pressure isn't the kind of stress they're talking about.
>> More than half of the world’s children are exposed to early-life stress from abuse, household dysfunction such as violence or drug use, or other traumatic experiences
by basisword - Just FYI, that type of stress is typically not included as a form of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). That does not mean I think it does not matter. It does, and more so for kids with poor diets.
My childhood ACE's: Woke up on an operating table when I was three, mother and brother attempted suicide, Mother with schizoaffective disorder, physical abuse by my brothers, psychological torture by my brother (he forced me to watch him burn a nest full of baby birds with a blow torch).
by Noaidi - Not to mention having all this on your permanent record.by euroderf
- The healthy reaction for 16-18 years old is to not give a damn about that, rebel, and discover the other (or the same) sex and partying.by coldtea
- I don't think that's what they mean by 'early-life'.by golly_ned
- Alexander the Great won his first battle at the age of 18.
Treating 16 to 18 year old like 5 year olds is not the right way to go about it.
- I remember having it drilled into me in high school that I was procrastinating school work while at my mom's to avoid spending time with my dad and I was faking my sobbing for sympathy and I was a horrible person who was lucky to have a dad as good as I had and how I keep doing the same things wrong and I am a smartass prick who doesn't care about anyone but myself.
12-14 was rough.
School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.
by NewJazz - The optimal amount of stress about that stuff is not zero, and most teenagers are going to be desperately biased towards "none of this matters, just peermax".by syllogism
- For research in human spheres: https://birthpsychology.com/ - really interesting material!by 47282847
- Not a scar IMHO, but a wound that can be healed. SETD7 is a Histone Methyltransferase. Meaning it attaches methyl groups to DNA which turns genes off. But there are enzymes that remove these methyl groups as well and they are called Demethylases [1]. Many of these enzymes can be stimulated by their nutritional cofactors which are things like Zinc, Iron, and Riboflavin.
I am a product of early life trauma. Knowing these thing have helped me tremendously.
by Noaidi - I find enough weed to sink a battleship also works.by madaxe_again
- Wait that's very interesting. Any suggs for bio hacking?
Iiuc zinc can be tricky/fraught to experiment with and iron somewhat risky. Don't know about B2.
So perhaps start with each one on small dose, one week one, two weeks off, keep a journal, making no other changes?
And any suggs for things to avoid?
by diydsp - Whenever I’m having a dream at night, it’s always about my childhood and always at the place I grew up. It feels like my mind is a prisoner of the place I grew up. Childhood stress and trauma is deeply burnt into my brain I guess
- EMDR is an amazing thing, you might look into it. Be well, friend.by cfiggers
- Not to play down anyone's stressful life experiences, but the sort of stress they're talking about in this article is more typically correlated with stressors like violence, hunger, or institutionalization in the first decade of life.by anigbrowl
- Congrats on your safe childhood.by blueflow
- So just 7.2 million households in the US. Minimize the marginalized more daddy.
> https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
by rho138