Limbic Valence

I have been recently arguing that such things as Natural Rights etc are reflective of the genetic structure of the limbic system. Furthermore, the hippocampus is a key element in that system.

In a recent paper in Genes the authors note:

The hippocampus is a brain region important for learning, memory, and emotional responses  In addition to brain development that occurs during the prenatal period, significant brain growth and maturation including synaptogenesis, dendritic growth, and glial cell proliferation also occurs during the first few years of life. Environmental insults during this period can have lasting effects on brain structure and function, with the hippocampus displaying high susceptibility to the effects of early life environmental insults. Previous studies have identified altered gene expression in the hippocampus of individuals with altered functions, such as reduced learning and memory or  behavioral changes. However, the cellular mechanisms responsible for altered gene expression in response to early life environmental insults are largely unknown.

The field of epigenetics focuses on gene expression and phenotypic changes that develop without changes to an individual’s DNA sequence. One of the most well understood epigenetic marks is DNA methylation, which occurs predominantly at CpG sites—defined as a cytosine nucleotide followed by a guanine nucleotide—throughout the genome. DNA methylation levels play an important role in gene expression and are affected by environmental exposures during development. Due to the known relationship between environmental exposures, DNA methylation, and gene regulation, it is expected that aberrant gene expression resulting from altered DNA methylation levels can help explain phenotypic changes induced by environmental exposures. However, extracting multi-omics signatures from high-dimensional heterogeneous data presents unique analytical challenges because these data belong to the p>>n class of problems where the number of features is orders of magnitude larger than the number of samples in the study. Likewise, the common univariate approaches for ranking feature relevance fail to capture complex multivariate relationships and apply feature-ranking criteria unrelated to the model accuracy. These approaches can be unstable and result in high false discovery rates and unreproducible predictive models

This is an interesting result. The limbic system, early development and epigenetic impacts. Genetic, and clearly epigenetic factors impact the hippocampus as well as the other elements of the limbic system. The limbic system is what makes us rational/irrational creatures, it controls emotions, etc.