Epigenetic Inheritance

Epigenetic inheritance is the transmission of information from a cell or multicellular organism to its descendants without that information being encoded in the nucleotide sequence of the genes. The study of epigenetic inheritance is known as epigenetics.

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What the Amygdala Does and Doesn't Do in Aversive Learning

Whether you are a rat or a rabbit or a mouse or a monkey, your brain is constantly learning. Indeed, one could argue that this is one of the primary purposes of the nervous system: to adapt behavior to changing environments by storing a record of experience. When experiences are aversive, the type of learning that encodes memories of such events is generally called `aversive learning.' And although aversive learning is normally adaptive, it occasionally goes awry and contributes to the pathology associated with clinical disorders of fear and anxiety, such as posttraumatic stress disorder. As such, there is an urgent need to understand the behavioral principles and brain mechanisms of aversive learning.

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