NaturalChildbirth.org

[desertratmama]

Someone forwarded this to me, and its interesting! Thought some of you might enjoy it.
(Never heard it called"milk brain" but mommy brain or pregnancy brain is something I say often!)
~helena


Giving birth to supermom


WILLIAM ILLSEY ATKINSON

From Saturday's Globe and Mail


'Milk brain." It's a casual, common slur. Even women use it to
describe how disorganized they feel in the first frantic days after
giving birth. Yet milk brain is just a temporary effect, brought on by
sleep deprivation, plus the need to learn (or relearn) the details of
child care.

The lasting effect of being a mother, neuroscientists are finding, is
the exact opposite of milk brain."It's interesting to consider what
contributed to the myth of the less-than-intelligent maternal brain,"
says Kelly Lambert, a professor of behavioural neuroscience and
psychology at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia.

"A few studies have shown that, even though the moms thought they were
impaired or not up to speed, tests failed to show any impairment. So
maybe the mom's awareness of any mistakes or shortcomings is enhanced
during this maternal period. . . . She is probably doing better than
the non-maternal person in a similar situation."


It's true. Blood tests, laboratory experiments with animals and
humans, and magnetic-resonance images of working brains reveal that
from pregnancy on, female mammals are brighter, bolder and better able
to cope with life than their childless counterparts.

These brain improvements are permanent, lasting from the childbearing
years into senescence. Nature automatically turbo-charges the brains
of mothers. As all kids know, there's a shorthand name for superhuman:
mom.

Mothers don't necessarily outshine non-mothers in every possible way,
says Craig Kinsley, a professor of neuroscience at Virginia's
University of Richmond, and one of Dr. Lambert's senior collaborators.
All the same, the behaviours that do improve are so central that they
give a new mom an immense advantage over her childless sister. From
curiosity to self-confidence to sensory acuteness, the maternal brain
shines in a host of ways.

The triggers for maternal brain enhancement involve the same
signalling apparatus that governs the whole cascade of life. Puberty,
mating, conception, pregnancy and birth are all controlled by chemical
messengers called hormones.

Hormones perform a bewildering variety of functions in all mammals,
but particularly in females. Estrogens, including a powerful variety
called estradiol, are produced in a pregnant woman's ovaries and
placenta.

When they travel to the brain, they change it -- a process that until
recently was thought to be impossible. Under hormonal direction, brain
cells are enlarged in the hypothalamus, a region that strongly affects
maternal behaviour.

Hormones increase neuronal branches in a nearby brain area called the
hippocampus. The hippocampus isn't directly involved in how mothers
behave, but it does play a key role in their general learning and
memory. From conception onward, both of these key functions are
intensified in moms.

Pregnancy hormones also beef up the brain's amygdala and prefrontal
cortices. The amygdala, part of an ancient core brain called the
limbic system, regulates intense emotions, including maternal love.
The prefrontal areas process sensory input, empathy and conscience.

The upshot of pregnancy, Dr. Kinsley says, is a maternal brain changed
forever in critical ways -- not just different, but vastly improved.

In his group's animal experiments, mother rats proved two times better
than virgin rats at finding food in mazes, and up to three times
bolder in exploring unknown situations.

And in competitions involving multitasking, mother rats beat the tails
off their virgin cousins. In every aspect of evolutionary success --
cognition, exploration, adventurousness, general intelligence -- the
moms were tops.

Some critics say rats are rats and humans are humans, and never the
twain shall meet. Not so, Dr. Kinsley says. All mammals seem to share
a common machinery for hormonal brain enhancement. "Mapping the brain
circuitry of rats onto that of humans provides strong support for
animal models," he says.

For all mammals, it seems, the same maternal machinery has stayed
around for millions of years. It works. So why mess with a good thing?

At the Medical University of South Carolina, Jeffrey Lorberbaum, an
assistant psychiatry professor, is using magnetic resonance imaging to
examine the brains of human mothers listening to the cries of
newborns. The mothers, it turns out, can detect their own babies with
virtually unfailing accuracy. And they use the same traditional
maternal circuits that have been confirmed in rats.

Closer to home, at the University of Toronto, recent experiments by
psychology professor Alison Fleming have cast light on another
hormone's role in mother-child bonding. Cortisol is known to many
neurologists as a stress hormone -- in most people, male or female, it
accompanies depression. But during the first postpartum week, cortisol
seems to correlate with "attuned" (sympathetic) motherhood.

It's as if cortisol has a variety of roles -- a conclusion perfectly
consistent with the rest of human neurochemistry, whose molecules
constantly "moonlight" in wildly different jobs. Insulin, for example,
acts as both a hormone and an enzyme to metabolize blood sugar.

Dr. Fleming asked new mothers, most so recently delivered that they
were still in hospital, to inhale a variety of odours. The women were
not told what they were being exposed to; the samples they smelled
were in containers that held no clue to the odours' source.

"In fact, we put our samples in Baskin-Robbins ice-cream containers,"
Dr. Fleming laughs.

Besides a variety of control substances, she says, "we put in garments
from each mom's baby. We then recorded the 'hedonic rating' of the
smells -- the pleasure they gave to those inhaling them. Women with
higher cortisol levels were most attracted to the infant body odours.
Also, women who had the best ability to detect their own children by
smell also had the highest levels of cortisol in their blood."

Dr. Fleming suggests that the cortisol found in new mothers may arise
from the physical stress of delivery. Then, by improving maternal
care, it solidifies the fledgling bond between mother and child.
Cortisol "tunes up the female brain's responses to the baby's cues,"
she concludes.

(Similar stress infusions of cortisol may benefit students and
writers, whose cognitive abilities are in desperate need of help at
deadline time.)

What about dad in all this? Dr. Lorberbaum's group reports that human
fathers are far less responsive than the mothers to the sounds made by
kids, even their own. In MRI scans, maternal brains "lit up" more than
paternal ones.

Dr. Kinsley says these data agree with his personal observations.
"Here's something you can try yourself," he suggests. "Next time
you're in a restaurant and a child or baby cries, check what happens.
In my experience, all the men in the place keep talking without
interruption, while the women instantly orient themselves toward the
cry. Granted it's just anecdotal, and not a controlled experiment. But
I find the odds to be strong that this is indeed what will occur."

Looking at facts such as this, Dr. Kinsley jokes that you would almost
think that men are irrelevant to reproduction -- that is, until you
looked at the evolutionary forces that created the maternal and
paternal brains. "Once you do this, you won't see the gender
differences among human brains as an indictment of all males," he
says. "In the vast majority of mammalian species, fathers have little
or nothing to do with their progeny. We humans have a lot of evolution
to get past."

Fortunately, Dr. Kinsley says, "the brain has an almost infinite
capacity for plasticity." By "plasticity" he means that the brain,
recovering from injury or facing a novel situation, has an amazing
capacity to adapt.

Brains damaged by a lack of oxygen caused by a stroke may steadily
shift control of certain functions to undamaged cells. Epileptics with
large parts of their brains removed to forestall life-threatening
seizures live normal lives, as if their brains were still complete.
And men who love their wives and children often exhibit behaviour as
"maternal" as that of their wives.

"I recently started doing research with a paternal rodent model
focusing on the California deer mouse, a monogamous, biparental
species," Dr. Lambert wrote in an e-mail message. "I'm amazed at the
nurturing responses displayed by those mice -- even when the pups are
'alien pups' that are not their own. We've found that these mouse
fathers show more efficient foraging and less anxiety, just as we have
observed in the rat moms."

Other tests show elevated levels of non-hormonal regulators in the
brains of new human fathers. These molecules, including the
neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopresin, which act like endorphins, the
"feel-good" chemicals that the brain secretes, are also involved in
mother-baby bonding.

"We view the maternal experience as an enriching experience -- new
sights, sounds, smells and the like," Dr. Lambert says.

She adds that "most research suggests that being exposed to novel
situations enhances the complexity of the brain."

Does the obverse apply? Might childless people, especially men, have
atrophied brains? "It may be that the crusty old bachelor is living an
impoverished life in solitude and predictability, and this may not be
great for his brain and mental health," Dr. Lambert admits.

Yet people can change. Brain plasticity might explain the amazing
ability of some childless men to turn from curmudgeonly behaviour and
learn to love kids, even at an advanced age, Dr. Kinsley says. As
renowned psychologist R.D. Laing wrote more than 30 years ago,
children may be as necessary to the full development of the adult as
the other way around.

The dynamic brain

Less than a generation ago, the neurological dogma was that brains
don't change. After the 40th week of gestation, the brain had all the
neurons it would ever have. From that point on, brain cells might die
from a lack of oxygen, alcohol poisoning or old age. But individual
neurons would never change internally, and were never replaced.

This belief was first challenged by animal researchers. Before and
during mating season, areas in the brains of songbirds that produced
and recognized songs might double or triple. When mating season
finished, these beefed-up areas slimmed down to normal.

Science now realizes that human brains, like those of the songbirds,
also self-redesign at various points.

The first big renovation takes place in toddlers, readying them for language.

Another brain change at five to six years old gives kids basic logic,
which is why cultures the world over start formal schooling at this
age.

A third brain reno takes place throughout adolescence. This change is
truly massive, less a paint job than a gut and rebuild. The teenaged
brain automatically rewires its prefrontal cortex, the area just
behind the forehead that handles rational thought. This delicate,
unbelievably complicated transformation, involving billions of neurons
and trillions of inter-neuron linkages, prepares teens for the adult
world.

For women, there is another great mental change in store: motherhood.
"What was once a largely self-directed organism devoted to its own
needs and survival becomes one focused on the care and well-being of
its offspring," researchers Craig Kinsley and Kelly Lambert wrote
recently in Scientific American. "Although scientists have marvelled
at this transition, only now are they beginning to understand what
causes it."

-- William Illsey Atkinson

William Illsey Atkinson, a frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail,
is writing a book on the effect of hyper-violent video games on
adolescent brains.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060218.wxmothers0218/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home
_________________
mama to
Rhaynnon 3/6/01cleft palate, unable to nurse
Gwendolyn "Bug" 9/29/05 nursling, born at home

http://ragininaz.blogspot.com/