Essentials: Genes & the Inheritance of Memories Across Generations | Dr. Oded Rechavi

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Doctor. Oded Rejavi. Oded, thank you so much for being here. Totally my pleasure. Today, I mainly want to talk about is the incredible questions that you probe in your lab, which are incredibly significant for each and all of our lives. I think most people have a general understanding of what genes are, what RNA is, and so on, but maybe you could explain to people in very basic terms, and I'll just preface all this by saying that I think most people understand that if they have two blue eyed parents, that there's a higher probability that their offspring will have blue eyes than brown eyes, but most people generally understand and accept that if they spend part of their life, let's say studying architecture, that if they have children, that there's no real genetic reason, we assume, that their children would somehow be better at architecture because they contain the knowledge through the DNA of their parents. They might be exposed to it in the home, so called nature nurture, so nurture in that case, but that they wouldn't inherit knowledge. Today, I'm hoping you can explain to us why eye color, but not knowledge is thought to be inherited, and the huge landscape of interesting questions that this opens up, including some evidence that contrary to what we might think, certain types of knowledge at the level of cells and systems can be inherited. So DNA is the material, the genetic instructions that is contained in every one of our cells. We have the set of genes containing The entire set is called the genome. And this is present in every cell of our body, the same set of instructions. Genes are made of DNA and chromosomes. Are contained in chromosomes. Chromosomes is the DNA and the proteins that condense the DNA because we have a huge amount of DNA in every cell that you need to condense it to. Sort of like thread on a spool. Right. Huge amounts that you have to condense. And we have the same genome, the same DNA in every cell in our body. It's good to have an analogy to understand how it works. This is like the IKEA book that you have in every cell in your body, the instructions to make everything that you need in your house, the chairs, kitchen, the pictures. But in every room you want something else. So in the kitchen you want things that fit the kitchen and in the toilet you want things that fit the toilet. So you only remove one particular page of instructions, which is the instructions of how to build a chair, and this you place it in the …