Acetophenone
Of Mice, Men and Memory...
Have you ever spoken to that face in the mirror each morning, as if it were someone else?
Some primates recognize it as reflection, not another behind the glass. Most animals view their own image as competition, not themselves.
Or, if there are mirrors on opposite walls, pondered the enigma of a mirror in a mirror in a mirror, gradually smaller and smaller with your own likeness, and so on?
Sometimes a reflection is adequate; others inspire a silent I look like shit today…
Or, I’ve got to get better soon. I would make an unattractive corpse if today were the day I died…
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If you haven’t seen someone for a while, meeting again may be a shock, especially if it is someone you like. Each day brings changes.
That changes, and the mind instantly readjusts when the one so long absent begins to speak.
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The nature of memory and self-image, is fascinating.
Racial or ethnic hatred, for example.
Some work by Brian Diaz and Kerry Ressler (2013) in rats is a case in point. This is not to say psychology in rats and humans is identical, but more often than not, a fundamental biological principle demonstrated in lower species may lead to insight into human behavior and biology.
Or not.
Most behavioralists would deny the principle, but there it is.
Where does bias come from? Is it possible to benefit from hard lessons, not from your own life, but from antecedent kin in theirs, people you never met?
To begin, the experiment involved Pavlovian conditioning, the psychological linkage between a stimulus and a response, absent stimulus.
Pavlov rang a bell simultaneously with feeding a dog. After establishing a correlation between a stimulus (sound of a bell) and a memorable physiological experience (being fed), the dog was conditioned to expect food when a bell was rung.
It was not a mood or facial expression of anticipation, but a quantitative and measured physiological response (salivation), that was important in the experiment.
Classic Pavlovian conditioning.
Ressler asked a different question.
Could conditioning be genetically transmitted to offspring who had never been through the experience of conditioning?
His experiment was this.
Expose cages to acetophenone, the chemical responsible for the aroma of cherries, and pair the aroma exposure with an electric shock.
Eventually, the animals would demonstrate signs of stress from the aroma of cherries alone, even in absence of electric shock.
Classic conditioning.
The next iteration demonstrates how the creative mind of a biological researcher works.
Ressler took acetophenone-conditioned animals and bred them. The question was whether the pups, naive of any conditioning, would react to the cherry aroma stimulus.
The shocking finding (sic) was that there was clear evidence that the naive pups also demonstrated stress response to acetophenone.
Wow.
Progeny, at least in this model system, react to a stimulus associated with a traumatic experience that they had not witnessed.
The imagination, perhaps appropriately or inappropriately, immediately leaps to the relevance of this finding for humans.
It has nothing to do with cherries or shocks, theoretically.
Is it possible we inherit biases from our parents under some circumstances absent the experiences that led to the bias?
Let that sink in…
(Yes, but….yes, but…yes, but…).