The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(34)

Dorothy grimaced as she felt the needle. She tried to focus on the doctor.

“Those proteins function like switches, triggered by light, turning the ion receptor channels of those areas of the brain on and off,” Dr. Shedhorn said. “Then each subject is seated in front of an array of thousands of pinpoint lights—like the ones above you—designed to trigger those switches, firing the connected neurons to recreate the engrams previously captured by the MRI.”

Dorothy furrowed her brow. “So… if an Alzheimer’s patient struggles to recall something, like where they were born…”

“Then I trigger the saved engram of that place, creating a reproduction of that lost memory. The process is proximal,” Dr. Shedhorn said, “but the mind does a nice job of connecting the pieces and recreates that moment, in effect replanting the memory.”

Dorothy watched as the doctor entered a code into the keypad of a pharmacology cabinet, which chimed as it dispensed a small vial of milky, copper-colored liquid.

“But during clinical trials,” Dr. Shedhorn continued as she shook the glass vial, “not only were my patients recovering lost memories, there were distortions, extra memories that couldn’t be accounted for.”

“Epigenetic memories,” Dorothy said, remembering what she’d read.

Dr. Shedhorn nodded. “During the Alzheimer’s treatments, a small percentage of memory breakage was expected. I discounted artifacts as missed engramatic connections due to cellular deterioration caused by age or injury. But when those extra memories were correlated with the patient’s family history, I was stunned at the findings. For example, a patient named Cecilia, who had a fear of flying, developed new memories of airplane crashes. But the aircraft she described were of early twentieth-century vintage, large passenger planes with twin propeller-driven engines. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the patient’s grandmother was one of three survivors of a plane crash in 1951, when a twin-engine DC-8 went down in a snowstorm near Bothell. Cecilia’s parents rarely talked about that traumatic event. As humans, we seek to hide trauma. Even Hitler burned All Quiet on the Western Front because it remembered the horrors of war. In Cecilia’s family, no one wanted to remember the plane crash, but her DNA remembered and she ended up with that phobia nonetheless.”

Dorothy remembered Annabel’s drawings. The boy and the airplane, her sky tiger. How her daughter’s artwork was so similar to Dorothy’s own at the same age.

“Cecilia’s treatment had activated latent engrams—buried epigenetic memories—that were so traumatic they altered the methylation of her DNA at an early age, which affected her behavior and mental health. She had literally inherited her grandmother’s trauma, didn’t know it, and couldn’t escape it. Theorists used to call this phenomenon morphic resonance, or they’d try to explain it through family constellation therapy. But what I do here is biological instead of philosophical.”

Dorothy gazed up at the lights. Over the last two decades, she’d taken an alphabet soup of antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, and drugs for seizures. She’d meditated, used mindfulness apps, explored Kundalini yoga, cryotherapy, somatic therapy, play therapy, group therapy, and music therapy, until her counselor’s notes had become an orgy of acronyms as the PTSDs on her ACE score had been treated by EMDR, MFT, and ACT, but had become TAU. Nothing had helped.

Dr. Shedhorn nodded to the nurse, who then left the room. “Consciously or subconsciously, we’re capable of remembering much more than we’re aware of. The average person could never remember pi calculated to twenty thousand digits, yet there are stage actors who have memorized every line of Hamlet, which is more than forty thousand characters. Because memory uses the same areas of the brain as imagination, we remember stories more easily. Using your therapist’s notes, your medical history, and genealogy, I map out the known or suspected trauma within generations of your family. Instead of treating DNA as a blueprint, I regard it as a scorecard.” Dr. Shedhorn pushed the hypodermic needle through the top of the vial and drew ten milliliters of the fluid. “Then I use engrams from a shared database of tens of thousands of patients. By giving you the benign engrams of a place related to historical trauma, your brain will begin to process the buried epigenetic memories.”

“And generations of skeletons come out of the closet,” Dorothy said with equal parts wonder and trepidation. “I don’t know about specific trauma, but my five-year-old daughter appears to be mirroring some of the same obsessions I had as a child.”

“You share the same DNA,” Dr. Shedhorn said, “and a toddler is at an age where they’re forming their own memories and experiences, but not burdened by current events, so they remember more, for a while anyway. It’s tragic that children lose that epigenetic insight—or echo—around the time they’re learning to speak.”

Hearing that explanation made Dorothy feel a little less crazy. “As the US poet laureate Anis Mojgani once said about toddlers: They cannot be understood because they speak half English and half God.”

“I like that.” Dr. Shedhorn smiled again. “We’ll proceed whenever you’re ready.” She held up the syringe. “Once I push this through the IV, your brain will become minimally light receptive in a few minutes, with deeper receptivity building over time. This first session is like dipping your toe in the shallow end of the memory pool.”