Research Renaissance: Exploring the Future of Brain Science
Jun 17, 2026 · 55 min · 13 segments
What if the roots of anxiety, depression, and early puberty trace back to the first years of life — and we've been asking the wrong questions? In this episode, host Deborah Westphal sits down with…
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Angarika BalakrishnanGuestDeborah WestphalHostAnd I realized it's really important for us to be looking at all the interactions, not just the brain.
Is that area of study, is that pretty broad, or is it pretty niche, looking at that early development and the journey across the life of an individual? Because a lot of times we think about the brain and the disease as just what happens when you age.
Yes, there are things that people are born with, but that idea that maybe something that happens younger, which doesn't really show up maybe till you're older, is that an area that's emerging or has it always been there and it's more of a niche?
I recently published a paper that I'm really talking about this developmental period that is sensitive to traumatic events and how does that sort of shape leader-like behavior.
But to come back to your question, I think it is People consider it to be neat because people think that early life adversity is a monolithic event because we use early life stress as though it's a single variable that we can just dial up or down.
But when you actually go into the biology of it, you realize that the timing of an adverse experience and the type of adversity, whether it was predictable or random, whether there was a safe relationship in the middle of it, it all produces very different biological signatures in the developing brain.
Because even within the perinatal period, this period that we're talking about when the brain is developing and all these changes are happening, Because a child that experiences chronic neglect in the first year of life looks neurobiologically very different from a child that experiences one acute trauma at, let's say, age of eight or nine.
And these stress response systems are implicated in different epigenetic changes are different, the behavioral outcomes are different.
And then when we sort of collapse all of this into one single construct that's called adversity, we lose the mechanistic precision that would otherwise allow us to really target these interventions effectively.
I like to say that we've been treating adversity like a dial when it's more like an instrument panel and there are 20 different switches and even a flip of one switch can produce dramatically different experiences.
So I really think that while this field is very niche, there are many avenues that we can expand upon.
And like I said, within the instrument panel, really studying each and every switch is really important because right now, the only thing we have established is that adversity is bad for the brain.
And we really don't know which kind of adversity at which moment in which biological systems.
We've been kind of slow to get there, but I think we're getting there.
And I know we've had this discussion before in other venues about because some would say, well, one person's adversity is just just a normal day for another person.
can you shed some light on why this is important and it's not it's not necessarily just a feeling it it's it's a serious kind of condition if you would or I may not be defining that correctly no I think like this
Like, I keep thinking about, like, okay, I see, let's say, two siblings.
They are experiencing the same sort of chaos at home, but one of them emerges resilient, and the other one is just stuck there, sort of, as we call, broken, and they don't know how to function normally, or that comes out as behavioral outcomes, or even certain, like, genetic outcomes that happen later on in life.
And I realized it's really important for us to be looking at all the interactions, not just the brain.
Is that area of study, is that pretty broad, or is it pretty niche, looking at that early development and the journey across the life of an individual? Because a lot of times we think about the brain and the disease as just what happens when you age.
Yes, there are things that people are born with, but that idea that maybe something that happens younger, which doesn't really show up maybe till you're older, is that an area that's emerging or has it always been there and it's more of a niche?
I recently published a paper that I'm really talking about this developmental period that is sensitive to traumatic events and how does that sort of shape leader-like behavior.
But to come back to your question, I think it is People consider it to be neat because people think that early life adversity is a monolithic event because we use early life stress as though it's a single variable that we can just dial up or down.
But when you actually go into the biology of it, you realize that the timing of an adverse experience and the type of adversity, whether it was predictable or random, whether there was a safe relationship in the middle of it, it all produces very different biological signatures in the developing brain.
Because even within the perinatal period, this period that we're talking about when the brain is developing and all these changes are happening, Because a child that experiences chronic neglect in the first year of life looks neurobiologically very different from a child that experiences one acute trauma at, let's say, age of eight or nine.
And these stress response systems are implicated in different epigenetic changes are different, the behavioral outcomes are different.
And then when we sort of collapse all of this into one single construct that's called adversity, we lose the mechanistic precision that would otherwise allow us to really target these interventions effectively.
I like to say that we've been treating adversity like a dial when it's more like an instrument panel and there are 20 different switches and even a flip of one switch can produce dramatically different experiences.
So I really think that while this field is very niche, there are many avenues that we can expand upon.
And like I said, within the instrument panel, really studying each and every switch is really important because right now, the only thing we have established is that adversity is bad for the brain.
And we really don't know which kind of adversity at which moment in which biological systems.
We've been kind of slow to get there, but I think we're getting there.
And I know we've had this discussion before in other venues about because some would say, well, one person's adversity is just just a normal day for another person.
can you shed some light on why this is important and it's not it's not necessarily just a feeling it it's it's a serious kind of condition if you would or I may not be defining that correctly no I think like this
Like, I keep thinking about, like, okay, I see, let's say, two siblings.
They are experiencing the same sort of chaos at home, but one of them emerges resilient, and the other one is just stuck there, sort of, as we call, broken, and they don't know how to function normally, or that comes out as behavioral outcomes, or even certain, like, genetic outcomes that happen later on in life.
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