Can We Inherit Memories We Never Lived?

Years ago, I went to a BodyTalk practitioner because I had pain in the ball of my right foot the podiatrists diagnosed as Mortons neuroma. She told me something I have never forgotten.

According to her, the pain didn't begin with me. She believed I had somehow inherited the memory of an injury suffered by a distant female relative who had lived somewhere in the Celtic countries. This woman, she told me, had been running from a religious leader who intended to... well... let’s say he wanted to harm her. She escaped barefoot into the woods, stepped on a branch, and it pierced the ball of her right foot. And, now I inherited that pain.

Did I believe her? I didn't know then. I don't know now. But the story stayed with me.

Years later, when I wrote Seeds of Eden, I gave a version of that experience to Ruth Müller. Ruth shows up in Chapter One. She runs barefoot into the woods while fleeing Brother Eberhard, a religious leader, and injures her right foot on a branch.

I thought I was borrowing a strange story I'd once been told. Then I learned about epigenetics. And that's when things got interesting.

Epigenetics doesn't mean we inherit our ancestors' memories like tiny home movies stored in our DNA. Scientists aren't saying Grandma feared a spider, so somewhere inside you is a memory of her spider. It's stranger—and subtler—than that.

Here’s where I put my research ‘hat’ on, so hang with me!

Our experiences can affect chemical markers associated with DNA, changing the way certain genes behave without rewriting the genetic code itself. Researchers are now asking whether some effects of extreme experiences might influence later generations. One experiment particularly caught my attention.

Researchers taught male mice to fear a particular smell. The mice were exposed to the odor and received mild electric shocks until the smell itself produced fear. Then the mice reproduced. Their offspring had never received the shocks. And yet they showed increased sensitivity to that same smell. Researchers found corresponding changes in the neural system responsible for detecting it, and were also observed in another generation. 

That doesn't mean a mouse inherited a conscious memory of what happened to its father. And it certainly doesn't prove that the pain in my foot came from a terrified woman running barefoot through a Celtic forest. Science isn't there.

But scientists have also studied descendants of people who endured profound human trauma. Some studies have found differences in biological systems involved in the stress response, including epigenetic differences. The problem is separating what might have been inherited biologically from everything else families pass down—behavior, fear, silence, parenting, stories and environment. And perhaps that's what fascinates me most.

We tend to think inheritance means eye color, height, curly hair or a tendency toward certain diseases. But what if inheritance is more complicated?

What if an experience can leave something behind—not a memory exactly,

but an echo?

I have no idea why the ball of my right foot hurts to this day and why I must wear the ugliest shoes just to walk through the grocery store. I don't know whether that practitioner somehow knew something about my family's past, created an interesting story, or simply gave my imagination somewhere to wander.

But I do know this.

She told the story to me. I gave it to Ruth Müller. And now I've given a little piece of it to you. Maybe that's not epigenetics at all. But it is one way memories survive. And it makes me wonder:

How much of what we carry through life actually began with us?