Baby Brain

In addition to the other (at times significant) changes a soon-to-be-mother’s body undergoes while pregnant (a collection of evolutions and iterations often called “Matrescence”), a recent study found that women lose an average of nearly 5% of their brain’s total gray matter while pregnant.

This gray matter almost entirely returns by around six months after giving birth, but the current thinking is that this transformation is the result of the brain and body rewiring itself to optimize for motherhood: a process triggered by hormones and which results in an array of parenting-associated behaviors, the lack of which (in mice, at least) results in the parents basically ignoring their newborns.

That suspicion about the purpose of this gray matter loss is supported by the findings of this study, as the women who experienced the biggest changes in gray matter were also the most likely to report that they were bonding well with their babies, while less loss was more strongly associated with the opposite.