Scientific American: "When mice are exposed to enriched environments, their offspring can overcome g

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Could Living in a Mentally Enriching Environment Change Your Genes?
When mice are exposed to enriched environments, their offspring can overcome genetic defects that impair long-term memory.By Jennifer L. Barredo and Katherine E. Deeg

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Although these implications are seductive, these specific results usually aren’t easily generalized, or broadly applied, to human populations, however. EE seemed to rescue the memory impaired phenotype of the non-enriched knock-outs, but it bears reiterating that under this manipulation, the wild-type mice that demonstrated improved contextual memory following fear-conditioning did not demonstrate enhanced LTP.

What is true for highly derived lines of conventionally housed (read: sensory deprived) laboratory mice may not generalize to non-deprived humans. We should not assume that children born to mothers who were chronically bored during their adolescence will have memory deficits. ...

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