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.