These pop-sci articles annoy me greatly. All I can think reading the title is “well, duh?” - they’re a complete tautology.

Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.

If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.

This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”