the lack of popularity makes us experience pain.
And our brain is telling us,
with its most powerful signal, you need to do something about this.
Don't get kicked out of the herd.
Make sure that you are safe.
It turns out that there's some other research, also,
that has to do with our DNA.
That's found that this is even more powerful than we even realized.
But before we talk about that, I just have to tell you briefly about something
that's really new and it's the idea of epigenetics.
Epigenetics is really the sense that while we all have our DNA and
every single cell in our bodies has DNA in it's nucleus.
That DNA, not every gene is turned on.
Some genes turn on later and some genes never turn on.
But what we've recently learned in epigenetics is that sometimes what makes
those cells turn on certain DNA is something that happens in our environment.
So, believe it or not, someone could walk in the room, they could say hello to you,
or they could say something not pleasant to you, that kind of rejects you.
And that will actually affect what happens in your own cells.
And, the reason why this is important is because,
as you probably know, many of our cells are dying every second.
And new cells are growing every second.
So if an experience happens to you now,
the cells that will start growing two seconds from now.
Are going to start relying on the DNA that was
activated by what happened to you before.
In fact it's been suggested that every six months or so we are the person that
is reactive to what happened to us and those prior cells about six months ago.
So we are constantly new, renewed people
that are living through epigenetics based on what happened to us months before.
It turns out,
our social experiences have an incredibly important impact on that DNA.
So for the same reasons we talked about before, with hurting, and
with our evolutionary legacy.
We've learned that if something happens to us that makes us feel rejected
then our bodies turn on specific DNA.
And the DNA they turn on has to do with our physical health.
So again, let's think again about cave people.
If you were a person that was living back in those times One of the things
that happen when you lived with others, is you found that you got a lot of colds.
And the reason why is because viruses spread from human to human.
So as long as you're interacting with other people,
your DNA is activated to develop immunity to viruses.
And all of the genes that help us to resist viruses, are upregulateing,
in other words, they are kind of turned on.
If you were part of a herd, there was much less of a chance that
a dinosaur was going to come and eat your arm off.
Therefore, you wouldn't have to have all of the inflammatory
types of responses in your body, to quick heal that bleeding limb.
And keep you to survive.
You wouldn't need that kind of pro-inflammatory protection as much.
Well, what happens is the minute we get rejected by others,
we actually find that the genes that help us resist viruses become down-regulated.
In fact, you can take a blood test 40 minutes later and
find that you can see the signs of that so quickly.
Meanwhile, the inflammatory responses all up-regulate.
So, of course, if something happens to you for one minute today,
that doesn't mean you're going to have an inflammatory disease necessarily.
But if you experience chronic rejection, over so
much time you experience ways of feeling that you're not part of the herd.
You are not someone that is accepted and popular, than over time your cells
will continually develop this up-regulated inflammatory response.
So it turns out that popularity is actually changing the way that our DNA
expresses.
This has major implications for health.
And it turns out that there's a way that that has a feedback loop into our brains
and it even changes our mood and our experiences too.
And we'll talk about more of that later.