I am pretty certain that everyone who has ever been pregnant and had a baby can assure you these experiences will change you in many way.
Much has been said about the phenomenon of ‘baby brain’ and now science has gone ahead and confirmed what we have all known anyway: Pregnancy causes lasting changes in a woman’s brain.
Not that this is surprising, though – I mean; I remember feeling like my brain had gone to mush after having my first baby, and frequently found myself misplacing things, forgetting stuff and flat out feeling like I was going somewhat ga-ga.
But at least now you have a scientific comeback when someone throws the term ‘baby bran’ at you. Because according to a new study just published yesterday in Nature Neuroscience new mothers “showed evidence of ‘neural remodeling’ up to two years after giving birth.”
Neural remodeling, I tell you. In other words; pregnancy rewires our brains.
How’s that for super-human? Sure we all know that growing a human is no small feat, but just how much it affect our bodies and minds might surprise you.
A research team at Autonomous University of Barcelona, led by neuroscientist Elseline Hoekzema of Leiden University, performed brain scans on first-time mothers before and after pregnancy and found significant gray matter changes in brain regions associated with social cognition and theory of mind—the same regions that were activated when women looked at photos of their infants. These changes, which were still present two years after birth, predicted women’s scores on a test of maternal attachment, and were so clear that a computer algorithm could use them to identify which women had been pregnant.
But while the researchers found that the gray matter reductions lasted for at least two years after birth, they point out that this loss is not necessarily a bad thing. According to Hoekzema, “the localization where this happened was quite remarkable,” and occurred in brain regions involved in social cognition, particularly in the network dedicated to theory of mind, which helps us think about what is going on in someone else’s mind.
These were also the regions of the brain that had the strongest response when mothers looked at photos of their infants, and according to the researchers, these brain changes could also be used to predict how mothers scored on the attachment scale.
It is still not entirely clear why women lose gray matter during pregnancy, but Hoekzema thinks it may be because their brains are becoming more specialized in ways that will help them adapt to motherhood and respond to the needs of their babies.
Go Mother Nature, how amazing our women’s bodies?!
