WOMEN OFTEN complain their ability to think and reason goes out the window after having a child, but in fact the opposite is true. A new study shows a woman’s brain actually grows after having a baby.
The results also show that the greatest brain growth occurs in women who are particularly enthusiastic about their newcomer.
The brain growth comes in specific areas, according to the study of 19 women who gave birth at Yale-New Haven Hospital and which is published this morning in Behavioural Neuroscience, a journal of the American Psychological Association.
Perhaps not surprisingly, growth occurred in areas specifically linked to the hallmark traits of motherhood. This included maternal motivation, reward and emotion processing, sensory integration and also in the front of the brain where reasoning and judgment take place, the report’s authors said.
The research team used the latest tissue scanning equipment to take images of the brain at two to four weeks after birth and then at three to four months.
This showed that “grey matter volume [the thinking part of the brain] increased by a small but significant amount”, they reported.
These kinds of changes don’t normally occur unless the person has undergone significant levels of learning, brain injury or illness.
Something similar was noted years ago in studies of London taxi drivers who were found to have brain enlargement in areas associated with processing map details. The big question is did the birth itself and associated hormonal changes trigger the brain reshaping, or did the mother’s interaction with the child lead to the bigger brain?
Dr Pilyoung Kim, the neuroscientist who led the research team speculated that hormonal changes immediately after birth might help enable this brain reshaping. But newborns trigger an immediate change in behaviour, for example the “intense sensory-tactile stimulation” that immediately arises between mother and child.
Expansion of the motivation areas of the brain could be driven by the process of nurturing, they suggest. And clearly the realisation of what the newborn is going to cost might get one’s reasoning and judgment areas buzzing.
Happily the men were not left out of the equation. The researchers now want to expand their work to determine whether these changes also take place in the male brain.
Their inclusion won’t however, explain why those mothers who gushed the most about their babies also seemed to experience the greatest brain growth. Maybe it all comes down to enthusiasm.