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It is just before 9 a.m. when a loud bang makes passersby jump on a street in New Jersey. Only a few moments later, however, it becomes clear: it was just the faulty exhaust of a car, and so people continue to stream to work, to the subway or to the shops.
Only Sarah Larsson is still standing rooted to the spot at a nearby intersection, her whole body shaking. The shock is written all over her face. The memories of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York, of the explosions of the planes hitting the Twin Towers – suddenly they are there again. Just a bang from a defective exhaust was enough. The astonishing thing is that Sarah Larsson had not even been born at the time of the attacks.
Can feelings of stress be inherited?
Fifteen years ago, Sarah’s mother, heavily pregnant, witnessed the terrorist attacks in New York. The fears and negative thoughts and associations ate deep into the woman’s genes – and even into the DNA structure of the unborn Sarah. In fact, New York neurologist Rachel Yehuda found in a study that the offspring of mothers who had witnessed the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 while pregnant developed abnormal stress reactions.
“It is obvious that traumatic experiences also leave traces in our genes,” explains Rachel Yehuda. But how can one detect such changes? Cell biologist Bruce Lipton is convinced: “When cells divide, they pass on environmental influences and ‘impressions’ that they themselves have inherited or experienced over the course of their lives – through their lifestyle, even through their thoughts.” Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry have now been able to prove for the first time exactly this interaction between emotions and genes.
A unity of psyche and body
They found that stress, for example, has a direct influence on biochemical processes in our cells – and thereby triggers measurable changes in the functions of our DNA. The process behind this is not a direct change in the DNA, but an adjustment of the genetic code with the help of special enzymes that are able to switch genetic information in our genome on or off (so-called DNA methylation). What initially sounds complicated is actually nothing other than scientific proof that psychological factors have a direct influence on our body.
However, if thoughts and experiences can actually influence our genes and personality to such an extent that trauma is even passed on to our descendants, is it then also possible that we can change our DNA for the better through the power of thought? These are exactly the questions researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada asked themselves. And indeed: In one experiment, the test subjects managed to use certain meditation techniques to manipulate the biochemical structures of their DNA in such a way that, technically speaking, they aged more slowly than study participants in a control group.
In addition, another study by the PRBB Parc de Recerca Biomèdica in Barcelona and the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined the influence of so-called mindfulness meditation on genes. It turned out that the DNA of the study participants had changed in such a way that anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving drugs worked better.
