So many things change for a woman during pregnancy – and one of them could be her brain. New research suggests that "mommy brain" could be "a real thing", said The Washington Post , but the process is quite at odds with the "pop culture conception" of young mothers becoming "cognitively fuzzy and absent-minded". So what are the changes that occur, why do they happen and what does this discovery mean? 'Sweeping reorganisation' The brain undergoes a "sweeping reorganisation" when a woman is expecting a baby, said The Guardian , and few areas are untouched by the process.
Regular MRI scans from before conception until two years after childbirth revealed "widespread reorganisation" in the mother's brain, said the paper. Some regions of the brain, "especially those involved in social and emotional processing", got smaller, possibly "undergoing a fine-tuning process in preparation for parenting", said The New York Times . People can "bristle" when they hear that "grey matter volume decreases in pregnancy", said Professor Emily Jacobs, a researcher on the study from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But this change "probably reflects the fine tuning of neural circuits, not unlike the cortical thinning that happens during puberty". Jacobs compared this process to Michelangelo's masterpiece, "David". "You start off with this chunk of marble, and you chip away – that pruning can reveal the underlying beauty," she said.
While grey matter decreases, there were significant .