We were making the documentary film, In Utero, trying to bring together the most current science on pregnancy, as we moved towards having a child of our own.
(This is something we’ve been writing about over the past few months in the Huffington Post as In Utero approaches its general release next week.)
But along the way, we encountered a concept in pregnancy called “the imprint”. We had of course known about baby ducks and birds being imprinted. But human beings? In the womb? As we dug deeper during production we found that human imprinting is being discovered and researched in the fields of genetics, epigenetics, psychology, biology, as well as numerous other subfields.
It was quite disturbing, learning that from conception until birth, each of us is imprinted (genetically, biologically, psychologically) with profound aspects of the mother (yes, like little ducklings).
And like ducks, the imprint is “passed on from generation to generation,” notes best-selling author, Dr. Thomas Verny. “If a certain gene is switched on, it will continue to be switched on until the environment somehow switches it off.”
