The Embodied Mind: Understanding the Mysteries of Cellular Memory, Consciousness, and Our Bodies

Thomas R. Verny, M.D.

Fascinating. Dr. Verny takes us on a journey into the fully embodied nature of mental life.

— Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

The Embodied Mind

Understanding the Mysteries of Cellular Memory, Consciousness, and Our Bodies

To Sandra, my muse and my love

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.

—Adlai E. Stevenson II

INTRODUCTION

As a thirteen-year-old boy I read Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in the original German in Vienna. I was totally fascinated by how Freud’s slow, methodical questioning eventually led to the discovery of deeply hidden unconscious conflicts in the lives of his patients. Then and there I resolved to become a psychiatrist.

Years later, when I had become a psychiatrist, I continued to be fascinated by dreams and the unconscious. One day, while working with a young man on his dream he suddenly, without any input from me, started to cry like a little baby. He cried for close to ten minutes and then stopped on his own. What just happened? I asked him. He told me that in his mind he found himself in a crib and that he was crying for his mother. Then, he recalled that he had actually seen photos of himself as an infant and some of them pictured him lying in a blue crib whereas the crib that he had just experienced was definitely white. He wondered about the discrepancy.

I suggested that he ask his mother to resolve this question. The next week he returned for his regular appointment and told me that according to his mother, when he was born his parents lacked money for a new crib but were able to borrow one from a neighbor. The borrowed crib was white. A few months later, they were able to buy a new crib for him and that new crib was blue. That is the one of which all the photos were taken.

I felt both intrigued and mystified by this experience, since throughout my studies first at the University of Toronto then Harvard University, I was taught that children remember nothing before the age of two. And yet as I continued to practice, I repeatedly encountered patients who would tell me about events in their lives reaching far back in time to infancy, birth, and even womb life. A few of these memories may have originated from overheard conversations by family members or gleaned from photo albums or videos. However, a considerable number would not have been easily available and were corroborated by evidence supplied by parents, hospital reports, and other documentation. I wondered how to explain these memories scientifically. It was then that after much study, research, and personal contacts with colleagues in obstetrics, psychology, psychiatry, and other sciences, I wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, which is now published in twenty-seven countries and continues to enjoy wide popularity.

At the time, almost forty years ago now, I had much solid scientific evidence to back up the central premise of my book; namely, that an unborn child is a sensing, feeling, conscious, and remembering being, at least three months before birth. However, I had little or no scientific evidence to support cognition of any kind extending back further in time. Of course, given the rapidity of development and change in the biomedical sciences these past decades, forty years is practically an eon ago. Much of what is now known in cell biology, genetics, and more important, epigenetics, not only confirms my claims in The Secret Life, but enables me to put forward the bold new concepts in The Embodied Mind.

What set me on the path toward The Embodied Mind was an article I read six years ago reprinted from Reuters Science News titled Tiny Brain No Obstacle to French Civil Servant. It seems that in July 2007, a forty-four-year-old French man went to a hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. When doctors learned that the man had a spinal shunt removed when he was fourteen, they performed numerous scans of his head. What they discovered was a huge fluid-filled chamber occupying most of the space in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue. It was a case of hydrocephalus, literally—water on the brain. Dr. Lionel Feuillet of Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille was quoted as saying, The images were most unusual… the brain was virtually absent. The patient was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant apparently leading a normal life, despite having a cranium filled with spinal fluid and very little brain tissue.

To my surprise, I found in the medical literature an astonishing number of documented cases of adults who as children had parts of their brain removed to heal their persistent epilepsy. Following hemispherectomy most children showed not only an improvement in their intellectual capacity and sociability but also apparent retention of memory, personality, and sense of humor. Similarly, adults who have had hemispherectomies enjoyed excellent long-term seizure control and increased postoperative employability.

If people who lack a large part of their brain can function normally, or even relatively normally, then there must exist, I thought, some kind of a backup system that can kick in when the primary system crashes. I devoted the next six years to studying the medical and scientific literature, searching for evidence to support my hunch.

I found that while many scholars had contributed greatly to advancing science in their own fields, no one had really synthesized this knowledge, connected the dots, and thought of addressing this puzzle. The Embodied Mind attempts to do just that.

Our embodied mind is not the old enskulled one. It is an extended mind that relies on the intelligence of all the cells in our body that contain specific bits of information, micro-memories. All memories, consciousness, and the mind emerge from this linked sentient network.

The Embodied Mind, which I will seek to establish as its own unique psychobiological term, represents a coherent and empirically grounded biological theory that marks a significant departure from the past century’s exclusive focus on cortical neurons (brain cells) as the only important cells in information processing, cognition, and memory storage. The Embodied Mind is based on studies that demonstrate intelligence and memory in a wide range of systems well beyond the traditional central nervous system, including the immune system, sperm and ova, unicellular organisms, amoebae, and many more. Memory is truly a body-wide web. Whether or not we can consciously access a memory is not as important as the realization that we had the experience, the lived event, which has left some kind of impact, influence, mark, trace, record, or imprint on our cells and tissues.

A large number of these effects may be passed on to our children and grandchildren. Therefore, it is imperative that we become aware of as many of our basic maladaptive urges and behaviors as possible and consciously try to overcome them. At the same time, it is imperative for our sake but especially for the benefit of our future children to live a good and healthy life. We shall vastly improve our lives and the lives of future generations by actively avoiding stress and anxiety as well as people who are critical or deceitful and instead befriend people who support and value us.

Like musicians in an orchestra playing in different sections, be they strings, woodwinds, brass, or percussion, the cells in the skin contain different information from the cells in the heart and so on. The memory that emerges either consciously or unconsciously as a result of some trigger is heard like the music emanating from an orchestra. The higher brain centers take the place of the conductor and coordinate the messages that reach our conscious self and lead to cognition and behavior.

It is time we put to rest the myth of the enskulled brain and mind and adopted the scientifically evidence-based concept of the embodied brain and mind. This is a transformative, novel concept in psychobiology, at once paradigm-shifting and empowering.

We think, feel, and act with our body. We relate to the world with our body. Our mind is body bound. It is my hope that The Embodied Mind will help us gain more insights into who we are in relationship to ourselves, our loved ones, society, and the universe. It will motivate us to exercise our free will and encourage us to take responsibility for our own actions.

CHAPTER ONE

DO GENES MATTER?

Introduction

The union of sperm and egg at conception leads to the formation of a fertilized ovum, a one-celled organism, the zygote, that, if successfully implanted into its mother’s womb, will eventually become an adult person. This tiny cell will carry the blueprint for the future of an entire human being. Astonishing but true. What is even more amazing is that on the basis of solid scientific evidence I can say that this genetic information is not limited to just architectural plans for building a body but may also include data reflecting experiences and personality characteristics of the parents. Such acquired characteristics catapult us into the new science of epigenetics.

I think it is fair to say that epigenetics is the most revolutionary advance in the biological sciences since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Epigenetics is the study of the molecular mechanisms by which the environment regulates gene activity. Epigenetics teaches us that life experiences not only change us but that these changes may be passed on to our children and grandchildren down through many generations. This process is called trans-generational inheritance, and has become a hotly debated area of research.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes good sense that exposure of parents to significant environmental conditions such as hunger, warfare, anxiety, and the like should inform their offspring in order to better prepare them to meet these conditions when they are born. Obviously, this information can only be conveyed from parents to their children by way of their germ cells (ova and sperm).

In the last decade, genetic research has established that the DNA blueprints passed down through genes are not set in stone at birth. Genes are not destiny. Environmental influences, including nutrition, stress, and emotions, can modify the expression (whether they are turned on or off) of those genes without changing the genes themselves.

We shall take a whirlwind tour through genetics: chromosomes, genes, DNA, RNA, etc. Then we shall move on to epigenetics, which I have divided into environmental epigenetics, which deals with physical environmental factors such as pollution, toxins, too much or too little food, and psycho-social epigenetics, which is concerned with relationships, particularly parent-child relationships, and psychological factors such as stress, anxiety, or the presence or absence of affection. We shall pay particular attention to the impact of abusive and neglectful caregiving and parental adversity on a child’s epigenome.

Genetics

It is impossible to discuss genetics without the use of scientific jargon. For this, I ask your indulgence and patience. Even if you find some of these terms daunting, please read on. You will get the gist of it. I promise.

The basic unit of inheritance is the chromosome. A chromosome is an organized package of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) found in the nucleus of every cell. Different organisms have different numbers of chromosomes. Humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. These consist of twenty-two pairs of numbered chromosomes, called autosomes, and one pair of sex chromosomes, x and y. If you have xx, you become female; xy—male. Each child receives half of their chromosomes from their mother and half from their father.

A genome is the complete set of DNA in a cell. The twenty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand genes on the human genome make up only 5 percent of the entire genome. The rest consists of switches and long stretches of noncoding DNA (meaning they do not make proteins). These regions between genes were for a long time dismissed as junk DNA. Scientists have recently learned that the regions between the genes are the switches that play a vital role in cell functions. Mutations in those DNA regions can severely impact our health.

Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology, neuroscience, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, when discussing the human genome says in his wonderful book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, It is like you have a 100-page book, and 95 pages are instructions on how to read the other 5 pages.

In his seminal On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that evolutionary changes take place over many generations and through millions of years of natural selection. Following in Darwin’s footsteps, geneticists have had remarkable success in identifying individual genes with variations that lead to simple Mendelian traits and diseases (see endnotes) such as phenylketonuria (PKU), sickle-cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease, and cystic fibrosis. However, diseases with simple Mendelian patterns of inheritance are rare, while most human diseases such as cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia, and alcohol dependence, or personality traits and behavior, are the result of a multitude of genetic and psycho-socio-economic-cultural elements and therefore, considered complex and multifactorial.

Time magazine’s covers often reflect a dominant cultural, political, or scientific phenomenon. The October 25, 2004, cover portrayed a woman praying with the inscription THE GOD GENE. It refers to an article in that issue that hypothesizes on the presence of a God Gene in our genome. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

There is no God Gene, or Anger Gene, or Selfishness Gene, or Schizophrenia Gene. It takes many genes to develop a disease or bring about a personality trait. By the same token, a different combination of the same genes can create high intelligence, musical abilities, foresight, etc. Researchers from the University of Geneva report that genetic variation at a single genomic position impacts multiple, separate genes. If one element changes, the whole system changes. Genes teach us a crucial life lesson: Everything is connected.

A case in point is the finding that personality changes can affect body shape and body movements, at least in zebrafish (figure 1

), as a powerful new study from North Carolina State University demonstrated recently. The researchers bred one group of fish to be bolder and another group to be shy. Zebrafish that were bred to be bold displayed a sleeker body shape and an ability to dart around the water more quickly when startled than those bred to be shy. This study supports the assumption that traits like personality or temperament may be genetically correlated with other traits, like body shape. The body is one complex ecosystem where if even the smallest part changes, everything changes, like the proverbial domino effect.

The genome’s functioning is dependent on its intracellular environment (the environment in the cell surrounding the nucleus) and its relationship to the extracellular environment, including hormones and neurotransmitters. The extracellular environment, in other words, the tissues and organs of the body outside the cell, are in turn affected by the environment of the individual—for example, by the availability of food or social interactions. Consequently, we unconsciously adjust our lives to everything that transpires inside and outside of us. It’s wonderful that our body can do this on its own. We don’t even have to think about it most of the time.

With a few exceptions, every cell type in a multicellular organism carries the same endowment of genetic instructions encoded in its DNA genome. Nevertheless, each cell type expresses (activates) only those genes required for its specific performance of function. The proteins that package the genes in the cell nucleus are called histones. Histones act as spools around which DNA winds (figure 1.2

). Histones play an important role in gene regulation. More on this in the next section.

The dominant view of heredity is that all information passed down from one generation to the next is stored in an organism’s DNA. Very recently, cellular biologist Antony Jose has advanced a new, we might say revolutionary, theoretical framework for heredity. Jose challenges the common view of heredity that all information passed down from one generation to the next is stored in an organism’s DNA and argues that DNA is just the ingredient list, not the set of instructions used to build and maintain a living organism. The instructions, he says, are much more complicated, and they are stored in the molecules that regulate a cell’s DNA. Jose’s new framework recasts heredity as a complex, networked information system in which all the regulatory molecules that help the cell to function can constitute a store of hereditary information.

Jose’s framework helps us to understand how the storage of information has evolved with complexity over the millennia that must include now the cytoplasm and the cellular membrane in addition to the nucleus. It reemphasizes the need to abandon outmoded concepts of central control mechanism and instead introduce concepts of networks and feedback loops.

The early twentieth century geneticists’ view of heredity saw the development of an organism as a one-way flow of information from nuclear DNA to messenger RNA to protein production. This model, also known as the central dogma of genetics, is now being superseded by the recent rise of epigenetics. As we shall see, epigenetics is based on the ways that extranuclear factors interact with genes to bring about the changes in an individual.

Epigenetics

Another cover of Time magazine, in early January 2010, also depicted a double helix of DNA, this time as a giant zipper hanging down across the cover, its shiny gold slider opening part way, as if unzipping an actual strand of DNA. This time the cover story was: Why Your DNA Isn’t Your Destiny: The new science of epigenetics reveals how the choices you make can change your genes—and those of your kids. This time, Time was on the right track.

While Darwin’s work defined evolution as a process of incidental, random mutation between generations and survival of the fittest, the new science of epigenetics is much closer to the greatly maligned theory of French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who suggested that an organism can pass to its offspring characteristics acquired during its lifetime.

Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene activity that do not alter the genes themselves but still get passed down to at least one successive generation. These patterns of gene expression are governed by the cellular material—the epigenome—that sits on top of the genome, just outside it (hence the prefix epi, which means above). A key component of epigenetics is methylation, in which a chemical group (methyl) attaches to parts of the DNA—a process that acts like a dimmer on gene function in response to physical and psychosocial factors. Epigenetic switches turn genes on or off, and all points in between (figures 1.3

and 1.4

).

Methylation is a dynamic process, and levels of methylation can change from moment to moment and over the course of a person’s lifetime depending on the person’s experiences, whether these be external or internal. The opposite process to methylation is acetylation. Methylation turns down or totally silences the function of a gene while acetylation turns on the gene, partially or totally.

It is through epigenetic switches that environmental factors like prenatal nutrition, stress, and postnatal maternal behavior can affect gene expression that is passed from parents to their children. Epigenetic changes represent a biological response to one or more environmental factors. These factors may be positive and life affirming or negative and life threatening. Epigenetic changes serve a very important function during pregnancy by biologically preparing offspring for the environment into which they will be born. Think of genetics as the hardware and epigenetics as the software in your computer.

One of the primary objectives of epigenetics is to study data transfer from one generation to the next by biological rather than psychological means. Biological inheritance speaks to the idea that the germ cells (sperm and eggs) are affected by significant environmental events, and that these changes in the genome are then passed on to descendants. Epigenetics offers us the knowledge and the means by which we can enhance physical and mental health, both in our offspring and ourselves.

The union of sperm and egg at conception leads to the formation of a zygote (a fertilized ovum). This tiny cell will carry a set of complete instructions for building an entire human being. I wondered: Is the information limited to just architectural plans for constructing a body, or does it also include data that will affect the mind? Before we move on to address this question, we should mention three other biological ways by which information may be exchanged between people that do not involve germ cells.

It has recently been discovered that some of the cells carried in the blood that pass between mother and child during pregnancy remain in their bodies. Also, a few cells from prior pregnancies persist in mothers for many years. This process is called microchimerism. Human and animal studies have found fetal origin cells in the mother’s skin, bloodstream, and all major organs, including the heart. What these studies show is that each of us carries two different cell populations, our own plus one from our mother. Women who have carried a child harbor at least three unique cell populations in their bodies—their own, their mother’s, and their child’s.

Similarly, blood donations and organ transplants can pass information on a cellular level to a recipient. If my hypothesis of cellular memory is correct, then these donor cells may, as in the case of microchimerism, affect their recipients’ minds and bodies in ways we are just beginning to explore.

Environmental Epigenetics

In this section we shall discuss how physical factors such as food, nicotine, or odors affect the genome.

A 1988 paper published by John Cairns in Nature, one of the most distinguished science journals, started a tectonic shift in genetics. The paper described an experiment in which a particular strain of bacteria, E. coli, that could not metabolize lactose (a sugar found in dairy products), was placed on a lactose medium (scientific jargon for food on which bacteria grow, usually in a petri dish). Instead of starving—which according to classical Darwinian theory they should have—the bacteria very quickly underwent genetic changes, allowing them to digest lactose and thus survive. Cairns reported that at least in some cases, selective pressures could specifically direct mutations. Good-bye Darwinist orthodoxy.

Cairns brazenly, as some critics said, raised the specter of possible Lamarckian hereditary mechanisms—one could not have been more heretical than that in 1988. In the same issue of Nature, Franklin Stahl, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Oregon, endorsed Cairns’s conclusions and presented his own model of how "directed mutations" may take place.

Cairns today is professor of microbiology at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford University, and remains a recognized leading authority in mutation genetics. His 1988 article is one of the most frequently cited papers in the field, and has launched an entire new area of study.

At about the same time as Cairns was performing his experiments, Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, at the University of Umeå, Sweden, wondered, Could parents’ experiences early in their lives somehow change the traits they passed to their offspring? Bygren and many other scientists have now amassed abundant historical evidence suggesting that powerful environmental conditions (near death from starvation, for instance) can leave an imprint on the genetic material in eggs and sperm. These genetic imprints can short-circuit evolution and pass along new traits in a single generation.

A decade after the publication of Cairns’s paper, professor of biology at Indiana University P. L. Foster wrote, Much subsequent research has shown that mutation rates can vary, and that they increase during certain stresses such as nutritional deprivation. The phenomenon has come to be called adaptive mutation." Today, adaptive mutation has been transformed into epigenetics. And suddenly, every university lab is pursuing it.

A favorite animal that geneticists love to study is C. elegans. Between October 1994 and January 1995, seventy-three scientific articles about C. elegans appeared in international journals. C. elegans is a very primitive worm about 1 mm in length that lives in the soil (figure 1.5

). C. elegans is an appealing and effective model organism for research because it is easy to work with in the lab, requires little food, and produces a large number of offspring by self-fertilization within a few days.

The worm is conceived as a single cell that undergoes a complex process of morphogenesis.¹

It has a nervous system with a brain (the circumpharyngeal nerve ring). It exhibits behavior and is even capable of rudimentary learning. C. elegans produces sperm and eggs, mates, and reproduces. All 959 somatic cells of its transparent body are visible with a microscope, and its average life span is a mere two to three weeks. Importantly, worms and humans share up to 80 percent of their genes. Not surprisingly, approximately half of all the known genes that are involved in human diseases can also be found in C. elegans. Scientists delight experimenting on this creature.

For example, researchers at Duke University have conducted a new study on the effects of starvation. What they did was to starve one group of C. elegans roundworms for one day and another group for eight days at the first stage of larval development after hatching. When feeding was resumed, the worms that were starved longer grew more slowly, and ended up smaller and less fertile. They also proved more susceptible to a second bout of starvation. Their offspring were smaller, fewer, and less fertile. However, these children and grandchildren of famine turned out to be more resistant to starvation, as if they had a memory of famine.

The field of epigenetics gained momentum when several decades ago scientists studied the children born to women who were pregnant during a period of famine toward the end of World War II in the Netherlands. They found that these children carried a particular chemical mark, or epigenetic signature, on one of their genes. The researchers linked that finding to differences in the children’s health later in life. The children grew smaller than the Dutch average and had higher than average body mass. Their children were also smaller and more susceptible to diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. These changes were detectable over three subsequent generations.

It is not just food that can starve offspring. In humans, so can poverty—as demonstrated by a British study at the University of Bristol. The researchers selected forty men from a group of three thousand born in 1958—half born into rich households and half born into poor ones. In the study, subjects were chosen from the top and bottom 20 percent according to socioeconomic status, so ensuring they had examples of both extremes.

Focusing on stretches of DNA called promoter regions, which translates to switches, the team examined more than 20,000 sites throughout the genome. The patterns were different between the two groups on almost one third of the sites. Most tellingly, methylation levels were drastically different at 1,252 sites of the men who came from poor households, but only at 545 sites in men from rich families. Because the samples were taken in middle age, the researchers couldn’t tell exactly when the epigenetic methyl groups were added or subtracted. While it is possible that the genes were altered in infancy, childhood, or even adulthood, the scientists conducting the experiments were of the opinion that the epigenetic changes they observed in adult DNA were largely the result of early life experience.

Today the most common surgical procedure in fertile women is delivery by elective cesarean section. Therefore, pregnant women or those planning on starting families should be aware of the research that has shed light on the fact that children born by cesarean section are at increased risk of developing asthma, type 1 diabetes, obesity, celiac disease, cancer, and suppression of their immune response.

Investigating this phenomenon, molecular cell biologists at the renowned Karolinska Institute in Sweden studied epigenetic alterations in the cord blood taken from