Can your lifestyle choices affect your child’s brain?

Show notes

PsychTalks Season 5, Episode 6 | Published 7 October 2026

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Can your lifestyle choices affect your child’s brain?

Before you’re even born, your parents’ health is already shaping your future wellbeing. Welcome to the world of epigenetics: where environmental factors – stress, diet and infection – leave molecular marks on genes, altering their expression across generations.

Professor Anthony Hannan from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health shares how a father’s health can impact offspring development, why our hunter-gatherer brains struggle with modern life and how precision medicine could transform future healthcare.

About Professor Anthony Hannan

Professor Anthony Hannan is Head of the Epigenetics and Neural Plasticity Group at The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. Professor Hannan received his undergraduate training and PhD in neuroscience from the University of Sydney. He was then awarded a Nuffield Medical Fellowship at the University of Oxford, where he subsequently held other research positions before returning to Australia on an NHMRC RD Wright Career Development Fellowship to establish a laboratory at The Florey.

Professor Hannan and colleagues provided the first demonstration in any genetic animal model that environmental stimulation can be therapeutic. This has led to new insights into gene-environment interactions in various brain disorders, including Huntington’s disease, dementia, autism, schizophrenia, depression and anxiety disorders.

His research team at The Florey explore how genes and the environment combine via experience-dependent plasticity in the healthy and diseased brain. Their research includes models of specific neurological and psychiatric disorders that involve cognitive and affective dysfunction, investigated at behavioural, cellular and molecular levels so as to identify pathogenic mechanisms and novel therapeutic targets.