Dring his conversation with Chris Williamson, Dr. Andrew Huberman discussed research about how our brains inherit genetic material from our parents in ways most people never imagined.
The standard understanding of genetics suggests that every cell in our body contains a 50-50 mix of genes from both mother and father. However, Huberman explained that this is actually a myth when it comes to the brain.
“Different brain areas are genetically identical to mom or to dad,” he stated. “Even in you and me, you have entire brain areas that are 100% the genes from dad.”
This discovery comes from research by Catherine Dulac, a prominent neuroscientist at Harvard. Her laboratory conducted elegant using genetic marking techniques to track which parent’s genes were expressed in different brain regions.
The findings revealed that entire brain structures can be purely X chromosome domains or Y chromosome domains, meaning they contain genetic material exclusively from one parent.
Huberman emphasized that this phenomenon exists “independent of the mitochondrial DNA piece” and specifically concerns genomic DNA. The implications become particularly striking when examining genetic diseases.
“You can actually either postmortem or in terms of the requirements of having a gene present in a given brain structure, you can realize that you have brains where a given brain area carries the disease mutation and another brain area doesn’t,” he explained.
Even more intriguingly, these genetically distinct brain regions correspond to structures that control fundamental functions, particularly those involving the hypothalamus. Huberman mentioned conditions like hyperphagia, where children cannot stop eating and become severely overweight, noting that such conditions can be traced to genes inherited specifically through one parent being expressed in particular brain regions.
The research methods involved both marking studies using different colors to identify maternal versus paternal genes, and more definitive studies tracking Y chromosome-specific genes. In cases where genes passed through the Y chromosome should theoretically appear everywhere, researchers found they were only present in specific brain structures, while other regions operated entirely on maternal genetic programming.
When people observe personality traits or behaviors and comment that someone “clearly got that from your mom or from your dad,” Huberman suggested this could actually be scientifically accurate.
“That’s actually could be true,” he confirmed. People might genuinely be “much more like their dad in certain ways and much more like their mom in certain ways” because their brain structures are literally separated out genetically.
While we may never know the exact genetic architecture of our own brains, Huberman proposed that “it very well could be” that our behavioral traits, cognitive tendencies, and even susceptibilities to certain conditions are determined by which parent contributed the genetic blueprint for the specific brain regions controlling those functions.
