One of the big daddies of modern psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, wrote about ancestral memory: the shared pool of historical experience that our species dwells in like captive fish dwell in their aquarium's water. But I'm interested in the concept of ancestral memory from a different angle: how strains of behavioral and emotional tendencies, like the strands of DNA that make some families short and some tall, are passed on through the generations to make some families peaceful and others belligerent. Some families open to others and others completely shut off. 

This certainly seems like learned behavior to me, though it's very possible that certain genetic predispositions must exist in order for that behavior to be learned. Children without excellent muscle memory and sense of pitch are unlikely to become great musicians, for instance. It's also possible that children may need certain genetic predispositions to fully inherit their parents' emotional proclivities, and that these genetic factors––which result in behavioral results––can be passed on from generation to generation. 

How silly of me to try talking like a scientist without any real qualifications. Please forgive me, as I'm merely searching for the proper language to describe what I know in my body: ancestral animosities live within me that I've inherited from my father, and that my father probably inherited from his father, and that my sons have very likely already inherited from me. 

It isn't far-fetched to suggest that this (acquired) behavior is wrapped up in genetics. (Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the inheritance of acquired characteristics look better and better over the years, don't they?) An article in Nature Neuroscience entitled "Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations," while it involved tracing the effects of trauma between generations of mice, suggests that this process is possible for higher mammals as well. Maybe someday we'll be able to trace our own traumas through the generations, and be able to understand why the great-grandson of the prisoner is so rebellious, or the grand-daughter of the immigrant is too timid to speak.  

But I'm here to tell you that this is true––all we lack is the ability to identify these tracings, which operate on our psyches every second of our lives. Don't bother waiting decades for the hard evidence. Don't bother waiting for computers as sophisticated as the human brain, because the brain is so much less complex than the psyche.

Oh, dear psyche! With your millions of ancestors still floating around inside of you! How I love you so, despite how you screw up my life and the lives of my children, and my children's children.... 

1. BOYS DESTROYING THINGS
2. TEACH ‘EM TO FIGHT