alt.hn

8/20/2026 at 9:08:36 PM

Early-life stress leaves a 'scar' inside brain cells

https://medicine.washu.edu/news/how-early-life-stress-leaves-a-scar-inside-brain-cells/

by gmays

8/21/2026 at 1:47:49 AM

I remember having it drilled into me in High School that unless you did well on your finals:

1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted. 2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career. 3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards.

Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.

by redrix

8/21/2026 at 3:01:12 AM

I remember having it drilled into me in high school that I was procrastinating school work while at my mom's to avoid spending time with my dad and I was faking my sobbing for sympathy and I was a horrible person who was lucky to have a dad as good as I had and how I keep doing the same things wrong and I am a smartass prick who doesn't care about anyone but myself.

12-14 was rough.

School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.

by NewJazz

8/21/2026 at 4:16:08 AM

I don't think that's what they mean by 'early-life'.

by golly_ned

8/21/2026 at 10:29:32 AM

The healthy reaction for 16-18 years old is to not give a damn about that, rebel, and discover the other (or the same) sex and partying.

by coldtea

8/21/2026 at 9:07:27 AM

The optimal amount of stress about that stuff is not zero, and most teenagers are going to be desperately biased towards "none of this matters, just peermax".

by syllogism

8/21/2026 at 12:14:46 PM

Not to mention having all this on your permanent record.

by euroderf

8/21/2026 at 5:10:05 AM

I remember having this in middle school, it was a nightmare and majorly fucked me up

by leoh

8/21/2026 at 6:53:51 AM

These pop-sci articles annoy me greatly. All I can think reading the title is “well, duh?” - they’re a complete tautology.

Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.

If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.

This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”

by sph

8/21/2026 at 12:35:05 PM

> Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it.

That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.

by hamper653

8/21/2026 at 4:02:13 AM

In mice.

by ls612

8/21/2026 at 5:12:09 AM

"In mice" is the right caveat for outcomes and the wrong one for mechanisms. Nobody’s selling you a drug here--they’re describing a chromatin change, and that’s the part rodents are actually good for.

The alternative study design is randomizing infants to early-life stress and biopsying their hippocampi at 30. Committee’s still reviewing it.

by leoh

8/21/2026 at 2:55:33 AM

[dead]

by naikrovek

8/21/2026 at 4:58:53 AM

Then my brain must be full of scars.

by jdw64

8/21/2026 at 2:05:48 AM

When our Little, Stuart falls down we don’t even know what he remembers. [in mice]

by nemosaltat