Short monologue (speaker identified as Jeffrey Bland, PhD) asserting that early child abuse leaves lasting, genome-associated marks that program brain and behavior. The speaker frames these changes as adaptive responses to a perceived ‘‘bad world,’’ argues the effects are long-lasting rather than transient, and says mechanisms exist that "print" experiences into the genome to alter future responses.
There's profound differences all over the genome that we can associate with early child abuse, suggesting that what you do to children early in life is actually memorized in their brain and can affect their behavior years and years later in life. Why does this happen? I still believe it's an adaptive response. Child abuse is a signal. The child is getting a signal. This is really a bad world. And she programs the brain to deal with this kind of world. And if that child is found in a civilized world, there is a tremendous misconnect between the programming and the kind of world that person is living in. So I think the major implication of it is that whatever we do counts and is memorized and nothing is really transient. There are mechanisms that print those things in our genome and program our genome to respond to those signals.
