Manda Scott

And particularly, we're not recycling fears of things that are not actually in our immediate environment.

So I want to look at that capacity to recycle fear and particularly to recycle fear that isn't ours.

I've put a link in the show notes to the DS and wrestler paper that came out in 2013 in nature and also to the scientific American pricey of it, which is slightly easier to read.

And this paper has become quite famous in neurophysiological circles, but I don't think it's quite in the general domain yet.

So in an effort to bring it there, it basically goes like this.

The group gave male mice.

exposure to a scent that's a little bit like almond blossom, at the same time is giving them really quite mild electric shocks to their feet.

I don't love this, but anyway, it got to the point where the mice were afraid of the scent.

And then...

They took semen from the mice and artificially inseminated female mice with that semen.

And for four generations, the male offspring were afraid of the scent.

And for three generations, the female offspring were afraid of the scent, despite never at any point having been exposed to electric shocks connected with the scent of something a bit like almond blossom.

So this is one more brick in the edifice of epigenetic thinking and the understanding that we can pass feelings down our generational lines.

And Francis Weller called our culture the trauma culture for a good reason.

A long, long time ago, our ancestors suffered separation from the web of life.

It will have been traumatic.

It isn't possible to have that sense of connectivity, to have that sense of I am OK, I am held by the web, to have that ruptured so that I'm not OK.

There is no web holding me.

And gradually over time, there is also no community that I can trust either.

This is guaranteed to be traumatic.