There are few, if any, things in life that are stronger than the bond between a mother and her child.
Becoming a mum doesn’t just change our appearance, it also alters us mentally, emotionally and even all the way down on a cellular level, as pieces of your baby’s cells stay inside your body for decades after your have given birth, and live on inside your body. It is at the same time crazy, but also, knowing the bond we actually do feel with our children, totally makes sense.
For centuries, this most powerful of bonds have been depicted by artists and written about by poets, but never before has anyone been able to capture it quite like this.
Below is the world’s first ever MRI image of the mother-and-child bond, as captured by neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe, who is actually the woman in the picture, alongside her two-month-old son, Percy.
Saxe, who is a neuroscientist with the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, explains to Today.com that she “just out of interest” wanted to see what our brains look like when we are cradling our children.
“This particular MR image, though, was not made for diagnostic purposes, nor even really for science,” says Saxe. “No one, to my knowledge, had ever made an MR image of a mother and child. We made this one because we wanted to see it.”
To many, the most striking part about the MRI is how it marks the differences in the baby’s and mother’s brain. The baby’s brain is smoother and darker compared to the mother’s, which has more folds and white matter. White matter, to enlighten you, is made up of myelin, which is the insulation on the wires that communicate messages inside your brain.
To Saxe, this difference represents how mothers shape and mold their babies from birth. “The way we speak, sing, hold, and play with our babies shapes the very foundations of the brain as our child grows.”
It’s this journey from infant to adult that the neuroscientist hopes to capture. To watch how a mother’s influence and touch and love actually shapes her baby’s brain right from the start. To view this, Saxe has studied how children’s brains respond to interaction with adults, how the blood vessels in the brain expand and flow in response to songs in their mother’s voice and favorite stories read aloud.
“The Mother and Child is a powerful symbol of love and innocence, beauty and fertility,” says Saxe. “Although these maternal values, and the women who embody them, may be venerated, they are usually viewed in opposition to other values: inquiry and intellect, progress and power. But I am a neuroscientist, and I worked to create this image; and I am also the mother in it, curled up inside the tube with my infant son.”
Wow. A truly beautiful picture of one of life’s most powerful forces.
(Feature image via Barefootblonde.com)
