It appears that moms pass on experience to their children without even trying, at least if you’re a mouse according to some surprising new nuture versus nature based research appearing in the Journal of Neuroscience. But it does have some interesting implications for human moms in the future too.
If you’re wondering, as I have done, why mice are used in studies like this, there’s a totally humbling, unflattering answer.
It seems the genetic makeup of a mouse is surprisingly similar to our own, what’s more it’s a whole lot quicker to breed, study and scrutinize a mouse.
And though this staple of research laboratories everywhere probably won’t get the credit due these tiny creatures have taught us much of what we know about the workings of our own species.
What the mice in this latest research tell us is that mothers are able to pass on their learning experiences to their children, things they learned even before they became pregnant.
This idea could dramatically change how we think of inheritance. It may well be more than just genetics – blue eyes or blonde hair – it might also include hard-learned experience. A sort of protective mechanism built in by nature.
The team of experts found that young mice raised in an enriched environment – a cage with stimulation, nesting materials and engaging toys – were able to pass along the benefits of what they’d learned to the next generation of pups. Pups they had after growing up and being removed from the enriched environment.
And it wasn’t better parenting by the stimulated mothers. Even pups that were swapped at birth, given to mothers who’d been raised in plain cages with wood chips, were able to learn better, so long as their biological parents had been raised with the toys and stimulation.
Early learning appears to leave lasting changes on the brain according to the study.
When the team looked at the brains of the parent mice, who’d been raised in the “enriched” cages they saw clear changes in long-term potentiation, a way to measure how well nerve cells communicate with each other.
The pups had the same changes in their brains as their stimulated mothers, though they did not pass this change to their own children. This leads the researchers to believe the changes to the mouse DNA were not permanent.
No one knows what brings on these changes in the brain.
One theory suggests that learning and stimulation could raise levels of hormones. These levels could remain elevated for a long time, and affect a developing fetus, including humans.
Continues below…
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Mothers Pass On Experience To Children… Without Even Trying continued
There is a good deal of evidence that during embryonic development a fetus is very sensitive to what the mother is exposed to in the outer environment. Food, chemicals or hormones could all play a role.
“You inherit to some degree some aspects of your parent’s experience,” explains Larry Feig, a professor of biochemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, and one of the leaders of the research team.
And since environments can be both good and bad, Dean Hartley, a neurosciences researcher who also worked on the nuture versus nature study, cautions us to look closely at the prenatal environment surrounding a mother.
