Fact of the day. Fact of the day. Hello, hi and welcome to Fact of the Day with me, Mark Lotsu. Licking wrapped babies. It's an interesting study and it's based around epigenetics.
Epigenetics is a study of a change in an organism's behaviour based around modification of gene expression as opposed to actually altering the genes themselves. So you're not changing the genes, you're just changing how they're expressed. So some scientists, I'm not sure what they were doing with their life, but they just saw some mother rats licking baby rats. at a later point in time, they thought, oh, these baby rats seem to be exhibiting different behaviours to these other baby rats which were licked differently. So they've got high licking and low licking mothers.
And the high licking mothers are the ones that lick babies lots and lots and lots, and the low licking mothers hardly lick the baby rats at all. And what they found was the offspring of mothers who lick the babies a lot tend to be much more calmer, much less aggressive, and don't tend to exhibit strange or abnormal sexual behaviour. Whereas the babies whose mothers didn't lick them a lot tend to be more aggressive and exhibit abnormal stranger sexual behavior So they did an experiment where they they fostered these babies out to high-licking mothers and low-licking mothers So basically what you do is you take a baby who is from a high-licking mother and then when that's grown up and then she has Babies her own those babies are giving to a low-licking mother and the baby from a low-licking mother when she's she's grown up And she has babies her own Her baby's given to a high-licking mother, so they're fostered out, so there's no link in terms of the genes. And what they found is exactly as I've explained. High-licking mothers, less stressed, less aggressive babies when they're older.
Low-licking mothers, more aggressive babies when they're older and different sexual behaviours. So it wasn't a biological mother that determined behaviour in the baby rats. It's actually...
the foster parents, the foster mother. So it showed there's a sequence of biochemical events triggered by the mother licking the baby which caused a change in the expression of the DNA, of the genes which led to a change in the rat's behaviour when they were older. So this is thought to be linked to humans in terms of expression of love.
So if babies and children, when they're shown lots of genuine love as babies and as they grow up, things like physical affection, reassurance, they're thought to become much calmer. and much more relaxed. Whereas if they're denied love, if they're denied genuine love or physical affection, they become much more aggressive and have a much shorter fuse. So what's the end result?
The end result is give more love. It doesn't matter if you're genetically related or not, give more love, it always helps. That is licking wrap, baby. Thanks so much for watching. Love you, bye,