Do you remember life鈥檚 highs and lows? If not, perhaps you can blame your genes. It looks as if a gene that influences how brains respond to neurotransmitters may affect our ability to recall emotional events.
Such incidents trigger the release of noradrenalin, which stimulates memory storage, says Dominique de Quervain at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Since the ability to recall emotional events varies from person to person, he wondered if a variant of ADRA2B, the gene that codes for the noradrenalin receptor, could be involved.
To find out, his team selected photos of various events, some unlikely to rouse emotions, others with a strong emotional charge, positive or negative. Then they showed the pictures to two large groups of people and later asked them which ones they remembered.
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One group comprised traumatised survivors of the Rwandan genocide, the other healthy Swiss citizens. In both groups, people with the ADRA2B variant were 鈥渟ubstantially more likely鈥� to remember both positive and negative images than people with other forms of the gene (Nature Neuroscience, ).
However, the Rwandans with the variant had far higher recall of the negative emotional events in the experiment than the Europeans who carried it. The variant is carried by 30 per cent of Caucasians and 12 per cent of Africans.
