EBeing pregnant isn’t just regarding having strange cravings, eating for two or getting ready to sleep less… It’s also regarding undergoing fundamental biological transformations. And if you think it only lasts for the nine months of pregnancy, think once more!
Recent research shows that the physiology of mothers changes during the years, even decades, following the birth of their child. But it does not stop there. Having a child turns an adult into a parent. This shows how it is not just the body but also the mind that changes radically. If we can imagine the extent to which motherhood leads to changes on the psychological level, we are not necessarily aware of what is happening concretely on the cerebral level.
Elseline Hoekzema from the University of Amsterdam and her colleagues from the University of Madrid have been able to follow the brain gray matter morphology of women before and following pregnancy, up to two years later. childbirth, compared with those of fathers and control women who had never had a child. The results of this first large-scale study are edifying. They reveal that pregnancy is specifically associated in mothers with significant and lasting changes in the volume of cerebral gray matter, with in particular the reorganization of a small region known for its involvement in social cognition and in particular in the ability that we have to put ourselves in the place of others. This is valuable for giving meaning to the reactions of the newborn, who cannot express himself verbally. But that’s not all.
It turns out that the brain region that changes is almost superimposed with the one that activates when mothers look at their babies following childbirth. Finally, the degree of modification of volume of this cerebral area with pregnancy makes it possible to predict the level of attachment of the mother vis-à-vis her baby. According to the authors, this cerebral plasticity might therefore truly underlie the process of transition to motherhood. Finally, the recording session performed at a distance from childbirth reveals that these modifications persist for at least two years following pregnancy and demonstrates to what extent motherhood modifies the brain of mothers in a lasting way.
In just a few days
On the strength of these results, the same team was recently able to show that pregnancy also modifies white matter and, in particular, the “default mode” network. This constitutes in a way the cerebral signature of our ego and is also transformed when a woman becomes a mother. This reconfiguration of the neuronal architecture would be essentially linked to the level of estradiol released in the third trimester of pregnancy and also seems to determine the attachment as well as the responsiveness of the mother to the signals of the infant. Mothers know it well, their baby is a part of themselves and will remain so for many years!
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