12 Nov The truth about your personaltiy-meditation
PART IV ? Can our environment change the behaviour of our genes?
Prof. Michael Meany at McGill University researched on a collection of brains in a brain bank!
He looked at 3,000 brains which once contained unique personalities, a unique set of memories and experiences
Each brain was accompanied by a detailed compilation of each brain?s biography, about the development and history of the individual as well as the level of pathology – this is called forensic phenotyping.
Michael Meany set out to explore where in the precise areas of brain anxiety is controlled but this would have been an impossible task with the number of cells in the brain so he looked at rats.
With mother rats to help. He looked at the long term effects of maternal love on baby rats. Rat?s maternal love and care in a rat is shown by the amount of licking by the mother of its infants. The more a mother rat licked her offspring; the more she was tactile the more it correlated with rat love and affection.
Professor Michael Meany aimed to assess how mother rats tactility i.e. physical contact between mother and off spring, affected the stress level of the baby rats as they grew up.
He found that –
some mother rats licked more than other mothers.
Some mother rats lick 2 to 3 times more frequently than other mothers
Results:
those baby rats when they grew up showed a modest level of response to stress.
Would this affect the next generation of mothers?
Yes behaviourally a low licking mother rat would show similar low licking behaviour like their mothers. You could become like your mothers!
The amount of licking influenced the behaviour of the genes. A well licked baby as adults grew up to deal with stress and anxiety a lot better.
This could suggest what happened to the discordant twins. Though they shared the same genes the affect of the environment i.e. perhaps the maternal care from the mother affected the expression of the genes in the hippocampus.
The Hippocampus associated with stress, emotions and memory. The hippocampus is the area where the discordant twins showed genetic differences. The maternal care, i.e. the influence of the environment affected the how the genes in the hippocampus was expressed and affected the change in the anatomy of the brain.
Going back to the brain bank, having studied the pathology of the 3,000 human brains and each of the brains biographical lives he found that those who had stressful events through maternal care in life also had changed anatomy of the brain as with the rats in the hippocampus.
CONCLUSION
Personality is not just something we are born with but something which is subtly shaped and modified throughout life. We are more flexible than had previously thought.
The more positive feedback from the environment i.e a more tactile mother resulted in more receptors in the brain and reduced levels of cortisols.
RESULTS
Michael felt better after 7 weeks of mental training.
His brain probing with machines showed concrete proof that meditation had changed the anatomy of his brain.
He is quicker to react to happy faces
His brain was cerebral asymmetry results showed the activity of right side reduced which shows a shift towards a positive mind set
Both showed a shift of Michael?s brain set to that of an optimistic
What you can do to help yourself?
Michael increased his meditation time from 10 to 20 minutes every day. He practiced for 20 minutes regularly every day and he advised to keep up with the practice.
Our personality is malleable if we change our outlook in life through mental training of meditation.
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