The latest issue of Bioscience Hypothesis contains an article by Dr. Alberto Halabe Bucay of the Research Center Halabe of Darwich, Mexico which suggests that the hormones and neurochemicals resulting from our mental states can profoundly effect germ cells.
These effected germ cells then express differently and that difference effects the moods of the child-to-be.
Literally.
Bucay believes that a parent's psychology before conception influences the child created. So if you're suffering from blues and decide to conceive your way out of this corner-your depression is going to impact your child-to-be.
Not that this should be too surprising.
Emotions are signals. Our senses gather data and convert this to chemistry and send those chemical messages to other parts of the brain. At a fundamental level what we call emotions are nothing more or less than a specific chemical combination moving through specific pathways in the brain-like dopamine flooding the striatum produces the sensation we call "satisfaction."
It's been known for a while that certain chemicals like endorphins, and drugs like heroin (which is nothing more or less than an artificial endorphin), have significant effects on our sperm and eggs and that these effects produce lasting changes in a child.
In short, happy parents produce happy kids etc.
But what's really interesting is the question of how far back does this chain go? If mood effects child, then mood also effects that child's children and so on. It's something of an infinite regress. If Bucay is correct, then we might not just be carrying the DNA of our ancestry around with us, we're carrying their feelings as well.
But why stop there. Since we now know that the same neurochemicals and neurochemical pathways associated with the seven basic human emotions are found in all mammals does this mean we are feeling our feelings through a skein that goes back to early mammalian development?
In fact, a lot of those pathways also show up in most birds, and (in a somewhat diminished capacity) in snakes, reptiles and fish-so maybe our feelings go back all the way to the dinosaurs.
Where this becomes really interesting is the eternal question—the question of oneness.
The notion that we are one-with-everything is the basis for just about every religion and mystical system on earth. So much so that Aldous Huxley called it "the perennial philosophy."
It is also the perennial scientific theory. When Joni Mitchell sang "we are stardust," she wasn't just being metaphorical. Humans are quite literally built out of stardust. Every atom in your body is endlessly recycled. Scientists believe that every person on this planet contains a few atoms that were once a part of Buddha and others from Abe Lincoln and more from just about every other historical figure you can think of
At the quantum level this becomes even more of the case. If particles are waves and waves are infinite where are the separations?
But saying we are one with everything has always been dismissed as hippie fantasy because of the hard problem of consciousness—you feel like an individual not a collective.
And this bears out in the real world as well.
No two of us will look at the same red barn and see the same color red. We won't because emotion effects attention which effects perception and perception shapes reality.
But if your emotions are really influenced by the emotions of your parents and their parents and so on and all the way back to some primitive starting point—then where is that separation?
The hard problem of consciousness is only a hard problem if we believe that consciousness is an individual phenomena. If all of our consciousnesses are linked through the historical pathway of emotion then, again, where is the separation?
As Bill Bryson once wrote: "It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is."
