Maternal Brain Changes

I read a fascinating article the other day.  Apparently, women's brains change so much after childbirth that researchers are able to distinguish between women who had given birth and a control group of women who hadn't just by looking at brain scans, and the changes were persistent enough that they could still distinguish between mothers and non-mothers two years later, from brain scans alone. 

Also, "the more brain change the mothers experienced, the higher they scored on measures of emotional attachment to their babies, a finding that echoed past studies. And the changes in most brain regions remained two years later.

The researchers also scanned men, those who became fathers during the study period and those who did not have a child, and found no comparable change in gray matter volume. (Other studies have found that fathers, including gay fathers raising children without maternal involvement, experience significant changes in brain activity, but those changes depend on exposure to the child. The more time a man spends as primary caregiver, the more activated the parental network in his brain becomes, and researchers suspect a similar effect may be present for others in a parental role.)

The brain scans seemed to validate the rapid, pronounced, long-lasting change in mothers that a much bigger body of animal research has found. Reviewing a range of studies, Pawluski and her coauthors wrote in a 2016 paper that as a developmental period, pregnancy is as formative as puberty.  “Under healthy conditions, the female brain transforms into a motivated, maternal mechanism,” they wrote."

I'm convinced that females evolved not to optimize female performance alone but the mother-infant duality.  Connections like this pop up all the time, and we ignore them at our peril.  I'd be very curious to see the nature of the changes in gay men who are full time caregivers compared to new moms.  I'd bet $1000 that they aren't as widespread or persistent.  That's just now how primates evolved.  Mothers really are irreplaceable.