Brian Dias - Triumph over Trauma

i want to start with a mantra that will become clear later on let us move closer to the truth, natural and anthropogenic events like famines ice storms domestic violence the holocaust the dutch hunger winter and the nine eleven terrorist attacks, have altered behavior and physiology, Individuals directly exposed to them for example grandchildren of famine survivors in sweden had altered longevity, what is the sentence of holocaust survivors and nine eleven

trauma suffers show differences in cortisol levels and increased ptsd risk , children of mothers who experienced abuse before conception display higher anxiety i hope you're intrigued.

are joined by the author who wrote the paper that i quoted that from in fact he's written many many papers he's driving the boundaries in the work that he does he's an innovator and he will definitely come out with a book at some stage after he has done the huge amount of research that he is going through it is such a pleasure to have him on the show. I've quoted him many, many times, as have loads of the guests on the show from Daniel Amen to Robert Sapolsky.

Last thing I'm going to say before I introduce him is a quote this time, a little bit different. This is from Gary Hamel, who is a business scholar who has written many, books and he wrote.

On what are our beliefs contingent the result is a holy inappropriate reverence for precedent precedents enacted into policy manuals corporate processes and training programs often outlive, the particular industry contexts that created them i find that the work that our guest has done, echoes what happens inside organizations echoes what happens inside human organisms it is a great pleasure to welcome.

The author of multiple papers some of which we're gonna share today brian Dias welcome to the show Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Great to have you man i, mixed together some of the articles that you've written along with some of your co authors and i thought we'd start with your review article titled legacies of salient environmental experiences insights from, Chemo sensation so we'll explain what all these terms mean but this article explores how parental exposure to, environmental stressors those involving chemical senses like smell and taste can impact the physiology and neurobiology of future generations.

And essentially what this means for the layman like myself is that smells and tastes experienced by parents can influence brain development, stress responses, and gene expression in And you have done magnificent work on that. So I thought we'd start with a quick summary of the work that you're doing, what you're driven by, what's actually driving this. Need this this passion to uncover the science that you are in covering and then we'll get stuck into some of the threads of these articles

My journey started in India, where I was born and brought up in Mumbai, and I came to the United States to do graduate school way back when. But the scientific journey that I'm on right now is a deeply personal one, It stems from the fact that I was physically abused by caregivers when I was a child.

And from that experience and all my scientific meanderings, I've arrived at what I think is my true North Star in science, which is to uncover how legacies of stress and trauma get bequeathed to future generations. and how we might engineer what I'm calling legacies of flourishing to be able to halt those legacies of trauma. And I do this for several reasons. I do this of course to give me some answers as to why I might be behaving or my physiology might be responding in particular ways.

I do it to make sure that I hopefully don't bequeath my own legacies of trauma to my two lovely children. And I want to give Everyone who's always been told that it's voices in their head, the idea that it's not all voices in one's head, our biology registers trauma, our biology registers experience, and as a result, we are fundamentally changed because of it.

So now coming to the work that we've done, in your introduction you talked about a swath of experiences, that humans have experienced with the challenges like the Holocaust, the 9 11 terrorist attacks, famines that have occurred across history, and how that has not only had effects on the generation that's directly exposed to them, but also has had ripple effects across generations.

But as you might imagine, it's really tough to parse out where the imprints of those broad stresses and traumas are.

And so Along with a host of colleagues, we scientists now are using chemosensation, which is the idea that you can use smell, you can use taste, to really tag a stress in one generation and allow for that stress to be followed across generations. And so I equate this looking, uh, looking for, a needle in a haystack. The needle that we're looking for is the impact of a particular stressor on the biology of the next generation of the generation that's exposed to them. But that haystack is huge.

And so we want to shrink that haystack and make the needle much bigger. And so by allowing us to focus on smell and taste and doing this in organisms ranging from worms to flies to mice, we can really Make that needle bigger, a smell, a taste, and then look in the haystack, which is our biology, to see how an experience with a particular smell or taste impacts the outcome.

Not only the generation that's exposed to that smell and taste, but also future generations, their neurobiology, and their behavior.

One of the studies that we've done that's been called a cherry blossom study over the years, and we've done this study now in 2014 and repeated it in 2019 and 2020, was we took male mice and we made them fearful of a particular smell. And we know that those male mice. Their biology is affected because of that experience with that odor.

But what we then found is that those male mice go on to sire offspring that now have brains where there's more real estate devoted to processing the smell that their father had been conditioned to, had been made fearful of. And their behavior is affected because , they show what we call a behavioral sensitivity to that particular smell, even though they've never smelt that particular odor before. And so it's important for me to say that there's a behavioral sensitivity.

It's not like we are saying that mice inherit the fears of their fathers. We don't think that this is a memory that is being inherited. But there's a behavioral sensitivity such that the future generation is now aware of it. more prime to respond to that particular smell when they encounter it. And so what we've shown is that exactly that.

What we've shown is that the future generation, because of this preexisting sensitivity to that particular smell, when they encounter it now in their own environments, they're able to learn. information about it much quicker than animals that don't have the sensitivity. And I think this has ramifications that I'm sure we're going to be talking about, not only in the scientific space, but also in business and economic space.

Beautifully articulated man because the papers as i was telling you are dense with information and they can be. They can be alienating in a way to read and it's one of the reasons i was so keen to have you on the show and i know you have to write them with the scientific rigor that you do write them with full of, massive bibliography is massive sighting of other studies as well so i thought i'd try and bridge the gap between that for audience as well.

There was a few questions i had on this so one was the why chemo sensory why do you choose those elements of smell and taste and then also the animals that you chose as well and there's probably hints in this that they're fast generations of animals etc but maybe a quick overview of what those two things would be helpful before we dive into.

What you found with the studies So as you recall, what we talked about is wanting to shrink the haystack in which we're looking for imprints of a particular experience and make the needle much bigger, but we need physical, tangible objects. within which to look for those imprints. And so chemosensation affords us a window into that because you have tangible. elements, like smell or like taste.

And then in the biology you have tangible elements like genes that encode proteins that respond to those particular smells or tastes. And so you can then start following within specific transgenic animals, be they worms or be they, mice, because you can, Label specific cells that only respond to a particular smell or taste. And look at specific genes that encode proteins that will respond to that smell and taste. And therein you can link and tag a stress physically.

in one generation, and follow it physically across generations. And that is tougher to do when you're looking at broader stressors and traumas like the ones that we've already talked about. i might show on the screen diagram from one of the studies. Because i found this would be hot this would be helpful for audience to get their head around what we're talking about to actually give a visual so.

For those i will have a little bit of empathy for those people who are just listening to us as well and describe maybe what we're we're showing on the screen by the way the show is also available on spotify video so we're. One of the preferred partners for Spotify video for those people who don't know that the show is now available there as well. So you can see what Brian's referring to on Spotify video and on YouTube over to you, Brian.

What we're showing you on the screen right now are studies on which we've performed in mice, studies that colleagues have performed with flies, and colleagues have performed in worms. And all of these studies broadly show that you can take mice, flies, or worms, make a particular odor, Or make a particular taste, especially salient to that particular mouse, fly, or worm. And then what happens is that the next generation registers information about that particular odor.

So there's a behavioral sensitivity in the mice to that odor in the next generation, even though they've never smelt that odor before. There's a memory. of that particular odor in flies, and there's a memory of a particular taste and an odor in the worms. And what we've also gone on to show is that in the mice, the dye is not cast. You can reverse, you can halt, you can prevent this legacy from bequeathed.

from being bequeathed to the next generation by performing what we call extinction training. So you can take these mice, make them fearful of a particular odor. And then what you can do is you can, you can give them these odor presentations without any aversive stimuli. And now the future generations are no longer sensitive to that particular smell and their brains don't really devote real estate towards processing that smell. love the term extinction training.

Cause I was like, on that side, Essentially what you're trying to do for an organization is to help them not be become extinct and you're trying to reverse this mindset change that happens inside organizations as well as one of the reasons i was so fascinated in your work. And knowing the context for which you're so passionate about this now even helps me even more. I'm so happy to have you on the show. I thought maybe we'd share how it's passed on.

So beyond the EVs, which is a term that you might unpack for us as well, there's ways that we pass on this legacy.

There are three main routes. via which legacies of stress and trauma get bequeathed to next generations. We can start off at the genesis of life, where sperm and egg can bear imprints of a particular experience.

And then when those sperm and egg unite to form the multicellular you and I, the embryo has already been bequeathed with the legacy that then the embryo develops a certain way, and the organism then will behave a certain way, and their physiology will respond a certain way in their own life.

You, of course, also have stress and trauma and experiences swirling around mom while she's pregnant, and you could have a fetus being exposed to a whole host of experiences and fetal development being affected. And that's how the legacies of stress echo across generations.

And then finally, and I think this is most relevant in an organizational behavior context, we have social transmission of information, we have caregiving behavior that could be affected as a result of which an individual experiences altered caregiving behavior. And that has ramifications for how those legacies of stress echo across generations.

And I would imagine that in organizations, depending on the stage of the organization, Whether it's an embryonic, it's embryonic, whether it's in the fetal stage, growing really rapidly, or whether it's established, there might be parallels between how information gets transmitted or inherited across generations and across generations. Thanks. all the stratifications of personnel that are in that organization.

Biologically speaking, we now know that there are a host of mechanisms by which the, this information is passed down to future generations. In sperm and egg, we know that there are these small molecules called RNA that act as puppeteers and they alter genes and how they expressed. And these, this altered gene expression is how that legacy of Germline experience, that legacy of experience via the sperm and egg, gets bequeathed to future generations.

In the fetal space, we know that hormonal systems in mum might be affected. That then gets transmitted via placental biology to the fetus and affects fetal development. And now we also know in the space where you have altered caregiving behavior that stress responsive circuits of the brain come to be affected in caregivers and that results in altered caregiving and altered responsiveness in the next generation.

And the final one of the frontiers of biology right now is something called extracellular vesicles. These are tiny little vesicles.

Gems, and I use that word intentionally, gems, which you can't see with our eyes coursing through all of us, one tissues releasing them, the other tissues taking them up, and I call them gems because way back when Darwin called them gemmules and posited that these gemmules allow for experiences to influence the biology of an individual who's directly experiencing a particular event, but might also result in future generations being affected by that particular event.

And so in many ways, extracellular vesicles right now, or EVs, are modern day Darwin gemmules. Do you know that story about the monkeys and the bananas supposedly it's a real study. I wrote about it years ago when I first started writing, I wrote about that, I called it monkeys, rats and Adidas hats.

It says in nineteen sixty seven a group of sign is place five monkeys in a cage in the middle of the cage stutter step ladder with a bunch of bananas on top, every time i want to climb the ladder to get the bananas to sign this hose down the rest of the monkeys with ice cold water after a while, whenever a monkey would venture up the ladder the other monkeys would pull it down and beat that monkey to avoid being hosed. In time, no monkey would dare climb the ladder at all.

The scientists went on to replace one of the monkeys with a new one. As you would expect, not knowing went on before, the first thing the new monkey did was to climb the ladder. Seeing this, the others pulled him down and beat him up before they were hosed. Every time this same new monkey try to climb the ladder he was beaten up soon the new monkey never tried to go up the ladder he simply gave up.

The experiment continued, next a second monkey was and the exact same behavior was observed however this time the previously new monkey joined in and beating up, the second new monkey the pattern continued as a third fourth and fifth new monkey were introduced. In the end, There were five brand new monkeys none of which had ever been hosed. However, they would still beat up any monkey who dare to climb the ladder.

that as a story of organizational culture how culture happens inside an organization and i'm not the only one because i discovered i was send you a gary hamill wrote this book in the nineteen nineties competing for the future he mentioned in there so it's a famous study, that's seen as this passing on a fear so i thought that was so, alike to what we're talking about here and i need to check if that was actually i can't find the origin of that story to see if it's true but

certainly it's true inside organizations i'm sure i'm sure you've seen it yourself, Absolutely. Absolutely. I hadn't thought about, you know, I love doing these things also because they make me think about stuff. So thank you for pushing me to think about organizations being embryonic, being in the, in the fetal growth phase, and then being in a mature phase where status quo is maintained.

And I think it's super important to think about how different information might be transmitted at different organizational's life and how that has ramifications for the longevity or not of a particular organization,

. Downturn their children saw that and their children are affected by seeing how maybe miserable or depressed their parents might have been struggling, you know so you can see how this is so interesting i'm gonna link it back to one of the things in the study and this time it's with wasp induced laying preferences and i mentioned to you that, Robert Sapolsky mentioned your work in the episode i did with him and he mentioned how.

If a human is from an area that experienced pestilence, they're going to be more xenophobic in the future. They're going to be less open to outsiders because somewhere epigenetically that's been passed down to them to go outsiders equal disease or pestilence, it's danger.

And when you start to see things this way, it's really interesting, but i'd love you to share, That you mentioned about wasp induced egg laying preferences and this is where fruit flies were exposed to parasitoid wasps and it changed where they laid their eggs i thought that was just absolutely fascinating. Colleagues have taken parasitoid wasps, and when those parasitoid wasps encounter fruit flies, those fruit flies now start laying eggs on ethanol laden plants.

material to prevent the death of their larvae. And then future generations come to also prefer laying their eggs on ethanol in the event that there are parasitoid wasps around. Now I think this too has ramifications for how we our biology responds, and should it respond? And these are existential questions for us as human beings, but these are also existential questions for organizations.

I think it behooves an ancestral generation in several ways to allow for the next generation to learn from what an ancestral generation has gone through. But is that really true? One could argue both ways, yes, but what if the future generation, the next iteration of an organization, is not going to experience the same environment that the ancestral generation, the previous CEO, had experienced? And I think therein lies the question.

is the mismatch or the match aspect of how we start to need to think about how organizations and biology can thrive in an ever changing environment. me grab a quote from again from this book competing for the future. So again, early 1990s, this book, Gary Hamel, CK Prahalad as well, a fellow Indian, by the way, CK Prahalad, amazing author and.

He wrote that the deeply encoded lessons of the past that are passed from one generation of managers to another pose two dangers for any organization, first individuals may over time forget what they, why they believe what they believe. And second managers may come to believe that what they don't know isn't worth knowing. A failure to appreciate the contingent nature of corporate beliefs afflict many companies. Yesterday's good ideas become today's policy guidelines and tomorrow's mandates.

Industry conventions and accepted best practices assume a life of their own. Dogmas go unquestioned and seldom do managers ask how we got this particular view of organization, strategy competition and under what environmental conditions did they emerge? So exactly to your point about what happens inside organizations this stuff does get passed down from organization to organization which is interesting for your work i think is well because.

What i love about science is that you're constantly updating it and. In a way what you're trying to do is disprove it or add on new things like i was reading recently that we've discovered there's a new organ that we didn't know inside the body so science is constantly updating and therefore there should be this not clinging to tightly to your hypothesis.

You know, one of my favorite quotes from a scientist is Conrad Lorenz, who said in a book, Every scientist should have a new hypothesis at breakfast every day. It keeps them young. And I think there's nothing that encapsulates science better than that quote, which is to constantly be updating, not hold on to one's dogmatically, but allow for the truth to prevail. And allowing for the truth to be an all star as scientists is exactly what a lot of us got into science for.

Maybe we could come back though , to the organization aspect, while I completely agree that organizations can get mired in past practices that might not serve them well for the world that we are currently living in, and I say might, because There is some benefit to obviously having an institutional memory.

However, I think organizations would also do well to take lessons out of our biology, and I bring that up because what the science is showing, what the data are showing, is that biology is extremely nimble and responsive to our environments, and therefore a changing environment. Automatically, in several ways, changes our biology. We don't know the logic about how that biology is changed, but our biology is changed by an altered environment.

And because of that, there lies the promise to turn a new page. to read a new chapter and sing a new song that is different from the one that had been written or sung before. absolutely love that man will come to that will come to the positivity of this that it's not just negative things that are passed on the past on is information so you don't have to be coming in totally tabula rasa you can actually have a way to survive and approach the world and.

I'd love to share a couple of things so these are things that i didn't read about in these papers but there was the cricket study as well that you mentioned to me as well and then i wanted to share with you, something that i came across and lorenz reminded me of butterflies and, the butterfly thing i found really interesting i'll share this with you afterwards is that there when they go on this great migration the butterflies who set out on that migration, pass on epigenetic information.

i'm one of the things they discovered was there was a point where they went to this, this space and they started to just go around this like phantom area was like i thought of you know the way wonder woman's. Spaceship would be invisible or bottle star galactica disappear and so they literally go around the space and like research like what the heck is going on here and it turned out that over years there was a mountain there.

And it had just eroded over years and years and years, but the epigenetic information was no longer useful. So there's still circumnavigating this mountain that was no longer there. So that I thought that was absolutely fascinating that , some of the information can be junk from the previous generation as well, which happens in organizations as well.

But that brings me to your cricket work what colleagues have done is they took female crickets who were pregnant and raised them in two environments. One which was riddled with wolf spiders and the other which had no wolf spider predation. And what they found is that that exposure allowed for future generations of crickets to now be most sensitive to the wolf spider odor and to avoid environments that had a high density of wolf spiders.

So again, we are going back to this idea that institutional memory, experiences do robustly affect future generations. The question becomes is, is it parsimonious to do that always if the next generation of crickets would not encounter wolf spiders and therein lies the rub. How does one prepare for a world that one doesn't know? anything about, or one doesn't know too much about. And I think that's the challenge.

Biology errs on the side of, let's overcompensate and prepare the next generation for that particular environment. And hopefully, if that environment does materialize, the next generation will be able to respond in an appropriate manner. The question then becomes, what if that environment is not experienced, does that become wasteful in terms of biology? And we don't know the answer to that because it's energetically costly for biology to register all of this.

And then does it make sense for the next generation to register this if they're never going to encounter it themselves? I think we can argue both aspects. We can argue for yes, it does make sense, to an extent. But what is that extent? And I imagine that same philosophy and thought process could be applied to organizations. There obviously is an upside to being able to prepare the next generation in the org chart for what had come before for the organization.

But there also needs to be one eye on the future in case that organization no longer faces that same particular headwind or faces that same particular wind beneath their sails. The way i think about it and i love how you articulate it is that, we almost have to have what i call it like a stem cell mindset that you know the way like for example ants can change roles, amazing biology and they're our. Elders.

They've survived a lot more psycho social insults and chemical insults as you call it in your papers nutritional insults than a human ever has been on the planet longer and i think when people See the work that you do and the animals that you use and insects and larvae etc in some ways to see them as less but these are hyper adapted, beings that have been longer around than we ever have

. i'm using as a segway for us so what about us what about us humans and as a father of a son, who is has a nut allergy with the carry around the epi pens inform us teachers about epi pens etc i find it really fascinating that how did that happen.

I'm the only thing i can think is i ate a lot of nuts i was doing a version of a paleo diet the time when we had him, i was eating a lot of nuts and i was like did i have too many notes to have to live what what the heck happened there and i'm gonna share again once again for our audience.

One of the diagrams that you have from the book because in this you do talk about this what are called i love the terminology by the way bequeath and sire and the next generation as well and i love love the way you articulate this as well but these terms nutritional, Psycho social and chemical insults so these are actually how you pass on these things i'll let you explain what they are and maybe unpack the visual that's on the screen,

what's important to note is that these particular routes are affected by obstacles that are put in their way that can manifest from all the environments that we experience in our lives. And I call these salient environmental experiences. And some of these could be nutritional insults where you could have a lot of food, you could have a little food, you could have psychosocial insults like wars, or you could have domestic abuse, and you could have chemical insults.

One of the chemical insults that we are now appreciating has ramifications for future generations is, of course, the racist practice of redlining. Growing up in environments that are laden with chemical pollutants and Now we also experience with climate change a lot of wildfires that are throwing particulate matter into our environments. All of these we now know can affect the germline. They can affect fetal development.

They can affect our caregiving behavior and in so doing these legacies of salient environmental experiences get bequeathed to the future generation. one of the things i thought was very sad is an equivalent of the matthew principle or the wealth gap so the rich get richer. And a physiological version of that where.

If you're born into a poor environment with scarcity or stress or physical abuse, This can alter brain development for offspring so structure gene expression and how the brain functions itself and i tell my children about this because i want them to understand that somebody not doing well in the world is not always.

Very rarely their fault they're born into an environment or they have had these these jeans or this conditioning passed on to them and it's very difficult when you think about somebody who is brain development. Is obstructed that they're gonna learn slower if they can learn at all you know one of the sad statistics i heard is many people in prison have.

Some form of dyslexia or some learning difficulties as well so it's very difficult for people when they fall into this now it will come to the positives it can be, reversed there are positives from all this as well but i thought we'd share a little bit about this about how the brain, Is it affected from a development perspective how stress response changes genetic changes and things like cortisol I think it's important to emphasize that biology is

responsive to environmental experiences and it matters as to when that environmental experience happens. So in the field, we typically used to talk about genes and environments and gene by environment interactions. This is the canonical nature versus nurture. Now we know it's nature and nurture. debate. It's no longer a debate. So it's genes and environments interacting. But we've now added a new dimension to this, which is time. And that's developmental time.

And so when an environment is particular, , is experienced, matters a whole lot. So because you can imagine if it's experienced preconceptionally, whether it's experienced in utero or whether it's whether an adult experiences it, all of those routes by which the legacy of that experience gets possibly bequeathed to the next generation is different. And so yes, brain development could be affected. Yes, stress responsiveness could be affected.

And the way that happens is the systems that are in place that want to balance out how our hormones respond to stress goes a little off kilter and we're aren't able to regulate those particular stress responsive axes. Now there's beautiful work, which is done by, by many, many, colleagues that have shown that it's because our biology registers that experience by putting the equivalent of a whiteout on a particular gene called the glucocorticoid receptor.

And when that whiteout is put on specific parts of the glucocorticoid receptor, that receptor is not expressed as much or it's expressed too much, as a result of your stress responsive axis then responds too well or not at all to the stressor. And that also poses its challenge to come back to that baseline, to come back to that homeostatic balance that our body craves and needs.

didn't understand that in the paper and i was telling you that i used to ai to cobot so i was trying to understand what does this mean and i was like, Tell me like i'm ten and then i gave it back to me is like give me a metaphor and i gave me this brilliant metaphor for this actually it said think of dna methylation like a light switch in a house, your dna is like a house full of lights or instructions and methylation is like flipping the switch on and off, when the switch is off the

light or the gene in this case doesn't work so that part of the dna is not used. When the switch is on the light works and the gene can be active and then it says now imagine your dna is like a huge ribbon wrapped around spools called histones, histone modifications are like tying and untying knots in the ribbon. If the ribbon is tightly knotted, it's hard to unwind it and read what's written on it. But if the knots are loose, it's easy to unwrap the ribbon and see what's inside.

The tighter the knot, the harder it is for your body to read the genes. The looser the knot, the easier it is. Both of these processes help control what parts of your DNA turn on and turn off, a bit like controlling which lights you turn on and off in your house, or how tightly you tie the ribbon.

And just like you can change the lights or knots different experiences like stress or diet can change how your genes are read, is that accurate because i wanted to make sure it wasn't confabulating or hallucinating I think it is for sure a metaphor that I like to use to illustrate how the environment interacts with our genes is that of a book. And I equate our DNA, our book of life, to the book that needs to be read.

Our environments then mobilize an army of editors, one with a highlighter, one with a whiteout. The other with a pen, and those highlighters come and put the equivalent of commas and full stops and highlights and blackouts on our Book of Life. As a result of which, if you saw calm and serenity, your Book of Life, page 2, might have highlights and a strategically placed full stop, and page 3 might be completely redacted. And from there is the symphony of your life.

Whereas maybe I went through strife and struggle, and that mobilized a different army of editors that actually went on to page three, and instead of redacting it, put the equivalent of highlights on page three. As a result, page three is now red, and I might go into a downward spiral disorder. And so from these two possibilities, page three being red or page three not being read, there are vastly different outcomes from the same book of life.

Not because page three is different, but page three is read differently because of that army of editors, those epigenetic marks that have been laid down differently by the environments that you and I have experienced. i love that metaphor because it even speaks to. Rewriting your story or reframing your story to try and think about it differently and this is where therapy comes in your linguistic programming etc i love that i gonna share on the screen another one which is you referred to a few.

Elements of this is an acronym you call legacy so maybe you bring us through this one What we're seeing on the screen right now are our contemporary understanding of how a salient environmental event has ripple effects across generations. The acronym that I like to keep in mind for this is LEGACIES.

Because we know these legacies are bequeathed via epigenetics, via aging being affected, cortisol dynamics being affected, immune function being affected, and extracellular vesicles being carriers of information, potentially from one generation to the germline. So I'm going to unpack each of these. When we talk about epigenetics, of course we talked about the book of life.

being read differently in you and I, and the reason for that Book of Life being read differently is that there's a different army of editors that puts the equivalent of whiteouts and full stops and highlights on different pages of our books and that results in vastly different outcomes for the next generation. Next, coming to aging, we all have birth certificates that tell us what our chronological age is, but now we appreciate that cells have a particular age as well.

And the way we know this is colleagues have developed these really sophisticated clocks called epigenetic clocks or DNA methylation clocks that can use the presence or absence of DNA methylation, one of these grammatical Full stop, so to speak, on different genes to compute what the age of a particular cell or a tissue is.

And what we now find is that racial discrimination, early life adversity, alters how tissues and cells age such that now that epigenetic age is very different from our chronological age. We've talked about cortisol dynamics, cortisol being a hormone that is involved in stress responsiveness, and how not being able to turn the stress response off is affected as a result of genes that are involved in stress response.

Encoding proteins associated with the stress responsive axis being differentially affected by a particular event. Across multiple studies, we now know that a salient environmental event not only affects immune function in that generation, but also affects immune function in the next generation. And finally, one of these batons that allows for information to flow. be passed on from one generation to the next are extracellular vesicles that leave certain cells and tissues in our body.

And beautiful work from several colleagues has shown that these extracellular vesicles then go and dump their contents into sperm and that's how that RNA, which is dumped into sperm, passes that baton of stress from one generation to the next. i went down the rabbit hole trying to understand some of the terminology that use one of them was the genetic clock and.

I was really intrigued by that because i don't know if you've ever seen this but i worked in a very toxic organization and on a couple of occasions there was a creche actually on site and i was having a coffee i just joined this company i was being introduced to this gentleman and chatting away to him, and then he goes, oh, I better go if to pick up my son from the creche. And I nearly spat my coffee.

I, I was like, on don't you mean your grandson ? That's what I was thinking because this guy was like, this guy looked old and then he walked off and I said to the other guy would you mind me asking what age he is? He goes, oh, he's younger than you. He is like 40. And I was like, what?

And I was just intrigued to see, I saw that pattern over and over again and it was a very stressful toxic environment where people were worried about what others said about them and the stress that that must have caused i found fascinating because people all looked older than they should have looked. And this is something that you talked about in this from a stress perspective as well this is a true phenomenon It definitely seems to be that way.

Now, what the epigenetic clock says about aging, I think, is up for discussion and colleagues are determining this. with studies as we speak, but again, that our biology registers as information at the level of DNA methylation is unequivocal. I should say that, if we were to start talking about how we can start engineering legacies of flourishing, there's a really important study from Jean Brody's group, which has shown that taking African American men in a context of rural Georgia.

And actualizing, self actualizing for themselves going to college and university. As all of us would imagine, that is something that we would all want for our own children and for a lot of society.

But we now know that even in those individuals, even though they self actualize that for themselves, it came at a cost in terms of the biological weathering that their immune system and their metabolic system bore the brunt of that cognitive load that it took to be able to actualize this better outcome that they wanted for themselves.

And so this is important, I think, from The perspective of us thinking about policy interventions where all of us have our hearts and minds in the right place and want to do good. But what we don't also realize is that, that doing good could also come at the cost of our biology, weathering that in different ways. And so we need to start being more holistic about this and trying to figure out what changing that arc is for all of us.

in a more holistic manner, because on the surface it may look like we're doing the right things, but our biology is saying something differently. wow.

It's funny you said that there was we had Gautham Makunda on the show before and he was telling us that presidents their life span is less than an average man or woman because of the amount of stress that they bear the amount of, of multiple ideas they have to hold in their head at one time is just so heavy that they actually live last time so it's a huge brunt to bear for people as well because you mentioned that and, i thought we'd segway to the positives of all this because.

If information can be passed on it's passed on for protecting us so i often think about like you know that whole story about we're being conditioned to have a negativity bias because that's what kept us alive the sound of the rustle in the bushes, don't be wondering is that a snake because if you go and actually stop to be curious you might actually be bitten by a snake so that's this is driven into us. Ultimately it's there for a positive reason. It may carry negative consequences.

So again, I'm showing a positive slide on the screen for our audience, for those who are watching us and for those who listen to us, we'll have a bit of empathy, Brian, maybe we'll finish on this. We'll share the positives of all of this.

Let's go back to that analogy or metaphor about epigenetics and environment interacting with one's genome, the book of life, by putting on the equivalent of Commas and full stops and whiteouts and highlights.

I like that metaphor because it illustrates that a book can be read in one way, but if it is punctuated in a different way, It can be re read in a different way, and I like that because it gives us optimism in how we can engineer legacies of flourishing, even in the aftermath of legacies of trauma. And so what you're seeing on this slide are three pillars that social scientists. have used over time to create stability in one's environment.

And we have data to suggest that each of these pillars, then, holds the legacy of stress not only in the generation that's directly exposed to them, but also future generations. So the first one is caregiver and social stability. Being part of a social fabric that nurtures you, that values you, is really important in being able to halt these legacies of stress.

And I think anyone in an organization that has experienced a supportive, nurturing ecosystem can attest to the fact that that brings out the best version of themselves. And in so doing, they can bring out the best version of others as well.

You also have economic stability where through a series of studies across multiple Countries now you have The equivalent of cash transfers being given to individuals, and that economic stability that comes with those cash transfers allows for those individuals to use that money in ways that work for them, but in so doing that also has ripple effects and halts any legacies of stress for future generations.

And then we also know that environmental stability, be that Living in an environment where there's nutritious food, living in an environment that has a lot of trees, living in an environment that is devoid of chemical pollutants, that serenity, that environmental stability also will affect our DNA by putting different marks on our particular books of life.

And in so doing, halts, prevents, stops in its tracks, these legacies of stress and trauma, such that again, we become the best version of ourselves and can bequeath that to the world. the same best version to our next generation.

Beautiful man beautiful i was thinking i didn't know about the context of your mission here and there's a great story about when you're bitten by a snake it's not the snake bite that will kill you it's not removing the poison so getting rid of that poison and i love this as a metaphor or a way of thinking that when we have setbacks or traumas in our lives.

You can use them as poison or you can use them as fuel and i love that you've done this and there's a quote by cs lewis that came to mind when i heard your story and the mission that you're on. He said that hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny and i really came to mind when i heard about your work and. I love the work you're doing and a huge supporter of it and happy to bring it to many, many people.

So I just wanted to say that and thank you for all this work that you do as well. And maybe you'll share where people can find you if they want to reach out to you and find out more about the studies or get involved in some way. How's the best way to find you? You can find me online on X at Dias digresses and on www. diaslab. weebly. com. Feel free to get in touch and thanks so much for engineering your own legacies of flourishing in your own lives for you and your communities.

And I just want to say, I had lots more notes and I just wanted to keep it tight. I wanted to keep it within an hour for people as well.

Cause if I keep the show under an hour, I can get it on to national radio here as well so that's one of the reasons i'm going to link to the other studies that we're going to cover is a fascinating piece of work maybe you'll just say a quick, nod to this one the piece of work that you did on conversations and the diverse team that wrote this article i've shared it with multiple people absolutely loved it.

And i opened the show with it and i didn't explain why so maybe i'll explain what that what the heck was aiden talk about back then See you started. The show by invoking a mantra which says let's move closer to the truth and that comes from a piece that I wrote with Tibetan Buddhist monk and Travel editor friends of mine about how to foster productive and respectful dialogue in society these days And the bedrock of that particular piece is Tibetan Buddhist debate.

I've had the privilege of teaching neuroscience of Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in monasteries in India, and I've witnessed firsthand how they converse, on really intricate and challenging topics, but do so with a vibrancy and respect and productivity that I think is solely lacking in society today. And we write about how the debating tradition starts with not let me be right and you be wrong, but let's move closer to the truth. Today, I will take a particular position.

I will challenge your position on that and you will defend it. And tomorrow we will change roles, and in so doing, you and I will have wrestled so much with a particular position that we will move closer to the truth, and I think that that is one of the panaceas to having, to ridding society of the challenges to conversation that all of us are facing today. It's so part of the show as well the whole idea of. The rigor to prepare and be open to the information, have these dialogues as well.

And, one of the things you talked about was the fact that most dialogue is seen almost like a battle. And I shared with you that a couple of guests I had on the show, Morton Christensen and Nick Chater. We had them on about this book, the language game, and they talked about conversation being a dance and it's turn taking. Even the mental model of that and that approach to it totally changed it as well.

So it was, there's lots of pieces in that article that I found so fascinating, but particularly the neurodiversity and neurodiverse team that you put together in order to write it as well, which was fascinating. So Brian, absolute pleasure having you on the show. I'm sure we'll be back in the future. I'm waiting for that book to come out, man. And I'll be buying it and supporting you and having you on the show again. Brian Dias thank you for joining us Thanks for your time. Pleasure to be here