biological basis of intergenerational trauma

#Biological basis of intergenerational trauma series

And that was really interesting, because what it meant was that stress hormones play a really critical role in how the brain develops and how behavior develops.

#Biological basis of intergenerational trauma series

And the work that I did in graduate school was really following up a series of findings that suggested that when you remove adrenal glands in infant rodent pups, the brain begins to develop much more than usual, and you get an adult rodent that has a brain that is 15% larger than if you hadn’t removed the adrenal glands. Yehuda: I think it was new, because everything was new.ĭr. Tippett: So that meant that things were lodging in our bodies and that things were happening at a physiological level and affecting all the things we associate with the brain. And even in the ’80s, as a graduate student, I was awed by that concept. It was an ability of stress hormones to circle back and influence how the brain functioned. It wasn’t just the brain regulating everything. And people knew a lot about stress hormones from the adrenals, but what started happening in the ’70s and the ’80s was a recognition that there were stress hormone receptors in the brain.Īnd what that meant was that the brain wasn’t just barking orders at peripheral tissue like the adrenal gland there was a dialogue going on. And people were very interested in it, and they were very interested in this idea that something that happens to you generates a biologic response. Yehuda: Yeah, I think “stress” as a word was in the culture, really, in the ’40s and ’50s, also, but it wasn’t until around that time that there was a biology associated with stress. Tippett: Was this around the time that “stress” was becoming this word that was in the culture?ĭr. My work in graduate school was focused on stress hormones, and there was a great deal of interest in understanding the biologic response to stress. Yehuda: Well, it was fascinating from the very beginning. And so I just - I wonder how you would start to tell the story of - in your lifetime, the emergence of - the difference between what you thought you were going into when you, I guess, decided, maybe - what was it? - that you wanted to study psychiatry, and how you’ve watched that develop what’s been fascinating to you to be part of, about that.ĭr. in psychology or neuroscience - that this young field was really just coming into its own. So you told me that you were the first graduating class where you were given the option of getting - was this your Ph.D.? So I was surrounded by - actually, immersed in the bubble of observant Judaism. So there was a lot of Jewish study and Jewish culture and Jewish religion in our home and, also, at school. I was raised in an observant Jewish community. Yehuda: I had a very strong spiritual background. Tippett: The way I start all of my conversations, whoever I’m talking to, is just wondering about how you would describe - how you would start to describe the religious or spiritual background of your childhood - however you would describe that now.ĭr. She grew up in a neighborhood in Cleveland that was heavily populated with Holocaust survivors, a fact she didn’t register so much as a child, but which later became pivotal to the discoveries she has helped make.

Tippett: Rachel Yehuda is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas, large and small, that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities. She’s studied the children of Holocaust survivors and the children of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. And Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. Krista Tippett, host: Genetics describes DNA sequencing, but the new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently, through changes in environment and behavior. I am not the same person that I was.” And epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking that. People say, when something cataclysmic happens to them, “I’m not the same person. The idea is a very simple idea, and you hear it from people all the time. Rachel Yehuda: We’re just starting to understand that just because you’re born with a certain set of genes, you’re not in a biologic prison as a result of those genes - that changes can be made to how those genes function, that can help.