In my second book in The Descendant trilogy, The Promise, the main character learns of generational memory. She finds out there is part of her brain, when awakened, which houses the knowledge of her ancestors. She is not the only one with this gift. Human’s from the beginning of time were designed with this ability but through time had closed off a large part of their brain and now function on only a small portion. Just a work of fiction, a writer’s mind letting the imagination wander into unknown areas.
You can imagine my surprise when a link to a website, Futurism, appeared on my Facebook page this morning with the headline “Inherited Memories”. Of course I immediately clicked on it and found there is an ongoing study regarding epigenetics, new word for me, which has revealed we may inherit memories from our ancestors.
In my work of fiction Gillian is able to tap into the previously unused section of her brain and can now speak, read and write the ancient languages of her ancestors. When I wrote this it was my imagination running rampant on the “what if’s”. What if there were sections of our brain we were meant to use but had closed off through time? What if we were capable of performing at much higher levels?
I had written an earlier blog about this regarding Déjà vu.
The study I read this morning emphasized traumatic memory being passed on. Would this explain why I am absolutely terrified of bridges? Did one of my long forgotten ancestors fall off a bridge? Of course their study is not on humans but worms. I am still trying to figure out how they are communicating with the worms to find out what they remember but there again I am not a scientist.
Fiction and science are really never too far apart. We have only to look at Star Trek to confirm.
So to all the writers out there, your thoughts may not be so crazy after all. One day what we thought could only happen in fiction could be a part of our everyday life.
Just my thoughts for today.
Have a great day everyone and put all your memories to good use!
