Psychic Motherhood: Can Your Mother Really Read Your Mind?

New mothers experience many changes, including major changes in their brains that make their more in tune with their infants. The reality of brain changes after giving birth gives lie to the old myths of "pregnancy brain" and "new mommy mindset."

The Myth of Mommy Brain

One of the enduring misconceptions about motherhood is that somehow mothers lose their mental acuity when they get pregnant. Referred to as mommy brain, pregnancy brain, and momnesia, mothers to be and mothers of newborns really do occupy a different mental space after they conceive. Their preoccupation with their child may cause women to become forgetful about daily tasks or even a little ditzy about facts and figures. That doesn't mean that women become "dumber" when they become mothers.

The simple fact is, moms, dads, men, women, teens, and children alike have memory lapses when they are busy, stressed, multitasking, or short on sleep. During pregnancy, expectant mothers are all of those things. You aren't cognitively sharp when you have a lot on your brain.

Hormones and the Expectant Mother's Brain

Surging hormone levels also explain psychic changes in motherhood. During pregnancy, an expectant mother's brain marinates in 20 to 40 times the normal amount of both estrogen and progesterone.

Estrogen stimulates the growth of blood vessels in the placenta. It also gives mothers to be that endlessly runny nose or their reddish glow. It makes the breasts, especially the nipples, and the abdomen more sensitive so that mothers are more acutely aware of their unborns and, later, the beginning of lactation.

Progesterone has so many functions in the brain and peripheral nervous system that it is often referred to as a neurosteroid. It both helps the fetal brain wire new connections that make a difference about age nine or ten, it also protects the mother's neurons from infection or injury. Brain tissues metabolize progesterone to the metabolite allopregnanolone, which is known to produce anti-anxiety, calming, and  improved memory effects.

Throughout pregnancy, a woman's body increases the number of receptors for the hormone oxytocin. As estrogen levels go up, oxytocin levels go up, too, although not dramatically. Then during labor, the hypothalamus in the brain increases the concentration of oxytocin in the brain itself by about 1000 times. The hormone helps the brain make new connections that bond the mother to her baby, increasing the intensity of her relationship with her child. However, all of these activities make parts of a woman's brain actually shrink.

Paradoxical Changes in a New Mother's Brain Help Her Bond with Her Child

Researcher Elseline Hoekzema at Leiden University in the Netherlands gave brain scans to mothers of newborns and also to fathers of newborns with surprising results. When women give birth, parts of their cerebral cortex that are involved with caring, compassion, and empathy actually shrink. However, neural pathways that are important to taking care of her baby are strengthened. Mothers react to their babies, not necessarily to every baby. They also have intensified feelings for their families, but not necessarily every family.

How Motherhood Makes Women Smarter

Even though many of us make motherhood the very definition of empathy, the meaning of empathy may be more complicated than is immediately obvious. Changes that take place in the brain of the mother that don't take place in the brain of the father include:

• Motherhood makes women better at acquiring resources. A mother's brain makes the connections needed to locate the essentials of life (food, shelter, personal security, and so on) faster than before she had her child or children. 
• Motherhood results in improved spatial memory. Mothers are better at remembering where things are. (Researcher Tombeau Cost, however, has not been able to prove this proposition in her experiments with recent mothers who volunteered for the test.)
• Motherhood results in better focus. When you are a mother, you can't go off in a hundred directions because you have to take care of your child. 
• Motherhood makes women bolder when their families are threatened. They are better able to "shake off" distressing experiences and continue their normal routine. A part of the brain known as the amgydala may shrink. This is the brain's "fear factory." The amygdala is the brain's center for associating fear with memory. When it is less active, people are calmer, quieter, and more capable of concentrated action. Women can take charge of a situation to take care of their young, finding courage they were unable to muster before.

A woman's brain actually shrinks during pregnancy 

The parts of her brain that are most involved in processing emotions and giving meaning to empathy, the insula, the superior temporal gyrus, and the thalamus have created new, dense neural connections by the time her child is six months old. Part of her brain that deal with learning, such as the substantia nigra, and parts of the brain that deal with regulating emotion, such as the amygdala and hypothalamus, and parts of the brain that deal with reasoning and judgment, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, have recovered to their previous size and activity.

There is only one major downside to the brain changes that take place during pregnancy. About one-fifth of women experience post-partum depression. Recently, researchers have linked this sometimes fatal depression to abnormal spikes of corticotrophin-releasing hormone, the "adrenaline" hormone, followed by abnormal lows after the child is born. Where there is a hormonal problem, there is often a hormonal treatment. If you are struck by postnatal depression, see your doctor. There is help.