The Mom Brain Revolution with Susana Carmona

Michael Feigelson What was, until that time, the scientific consensus? So for example, what did they teach about the impact of pregnancy on the brain in medical textbooks?

Susana Carmona Nothing. I’ll tell you what the textbook looks like. So if you open a textbook about the physiology and obstetrics and gynecologist, have you seen these illustrations in which you see like how the body of a woman changes when she’s pregnant? Haven’t you noticed they don’t have a head? We don’t even have a head.

Michael Feigelson So you’re saying that they cut the head off in the pictures. They literally cut the woman’s head off.

Susana Carmona Even when you see the mechanisms of parturition, it’s like it contains a baby and it has to take out the baby. Nothing else.

Michael Feigelson So this is where the story begins. A headless image of a pregnant woman. Because up until very recently, that’s more or less how pregnancy had been studied.

This podcast begins with a simple idea: when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents’ brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

This is Birth of a Parent, and our guest today is Susana Carmona. A neuroscientist who was one of the first people to study how pregnancy and infant care shapes the brain in lasting, measurable ways. She is the director of the Neuromaternal Lab in Madrid and author of a book about her discoveries, A Mother’s Brain, the New Science of the Neuromaternal Revolution.

But before any of that, there was a car ride.

Michael Feigelson Okay, so you’re studying the brain, you’re study neuroscience. How do you come to decide to study the maternal brain?

Susana Carmona One day in 2008, November 2008, we were driving in a car and I was driving two of my friends and PhD students, Elselina Hoekzema and Erika Barva. And we were talking about our studies on meditation, before meditation and after meditation, and the results were not really, really cool. At some point during the conversation, Erika told us that she wanted to become a mother. So we start talking in a personal manner, like how would it be to become mother. And at some point she said, why don’t we study mothers?

Michael Feigelson It sounds so obvious now, but turns out at the time, no one had really asked the question.

Susana Carmona Honestly, when we had this idea, we thought that, of course, somebody would have studied already what happens in the brain of a woman when she becomes pregnant. But when we got into the lab and we started searching on PubMed, we realized that there were a lot of studies on animal models on rats and mice. There was one study from the, like I think it was 1860 something, like centuries ago, studying a part of the brain in diseased women. And then another study of preeclampsia. That’s all, nothing else.

Michael Feigelson So for several centuries, almost all the research about the impact of pregnancy on the maternal brain had been done on rodents? Human mothers were studied only from the neck down. The brain was completely absent.

Susana Carmona Like if you search for any other type of process, you will find a lot of studies and a lot of revisions, but for motherhood there was like an empty field, a complete field to explore. And we started fantasizing about how can we answer this question? And the question was like, would the brain of a woman change when she becomes a mother?

Michael Feigelson Just to make sure I get it. You’re talking about the research, Erica tells you she wants to be a mom and instead of going out for dinner or wherever you’re going, you go to the lab and start searching up a database to find out what’s going on and you figure out that they’ve only done these studies on rats.

Susana Carmona Basically.

Michael Feigelson Do you remember anything about the conversation in the lab?

Susana Carmona I really remember the excitement, the hours thinking how to improve what was already done. One building after the other and we couldn’t stop, so we were so motivated. This just started as a normal conversation and like a game, right? But we were also so excited that we decided that same day that we will talk to the director of the program and ask them, please, please please, we should do this without funding at extra times, at extra hours. And we promise we won’t leave the other studies behind, but we should really answer these questions.

Michael Feigelson So as women weren’t you angry that nothing was available, that they only studied rats?

Susana Carmona So if I’m honest, at that time, I was not. I was not angry. I was more excited, like, OK, nobody has studied that. We should do that. Now I’m very angry. But this madness, it’s also very motivating. So it’s like, I’m so angry that I really want to figure it out.

Michael Feigelson It’s an interesting combination. On the one hand, there’s the excitement, a sense that you’ve stumbled onto something no one has looked at before. And on the other, the realization that no one had looked at this before.

We’re not talking about something obscure here. This is pregnancy, the most extreme physiological event in human life. An experience shared by most women on the planet and the one thing humans truly can’t live without. And yet for decades, if you wanted to understand what was happening in the brain during pregnancy, your best bet was to look at a rat.

Michael Feigelson Why do you think nobody had studied this before?

Susana Carmona Oh for many reasons. So one of them is like you know there’s this bias in biomedical research related to women. Like for many years they were excluded from medical trials just to prevent potential dangers for women that might be pregnant. So that meant that women from 16 to 50 something were completely excluded from the study. So we have built this biomedical knowledge bias towards male’s body and that’s very dangerous, especially now that we use AI and we train AI based on what we have so far and we are like losing half of the population. And also because now I realize how difficult it is to really study the brain of a woman when she becomes pregnant. At first we were very naive. We thought okay so she wants to get pregnant, I have this friend, so in nine months, ten months we will end up with a study. But those studies are super expensive and super time consuming. So we started the study in 2008 and the publication came nine years later. That’s a lot of time.

Michael Feigelson And what about the idea that, because for a long time we believe that the brain changes in childhood, but then it stops changing, do you think that’s part of the reason or not really?

Susana Carmona It could be. I haven’t thought about this that way, but many other processes have been studied. You have studies about how the brain of a taxi driver in London changes. So I don’t think it was because of that. It was just ignored or not important, not relevant. Sometimes I got like, you do these mommy things, right? You study these mommy things. As if it was not important. And actually, it’s the most profound physiological change and now we know that also at the neural level is the most profound neural change in adulthood.

Michael Feigelson So it wasn’t that the brain couldn’t change, we knew it could. We just chose some more interesting subjects. London taxi drivers, for example. But the brain of a pregnant woman, that was treated more like a side project, or worse, a “mommy thing”, until Susanne and her colleagues decided to take it seriously.

And what they found was not subtle. The brain doesn’t just change during pregnancy, it changes dramatically. In fact, as Susanna and her colleagues would later discover, it changes even more than it does during adolescence.

Susana Carmona If you had to explain to your daughter what happened in your brain when you were pregnant with her, how would you do that?

Susana Carmona Oui, how would I do that? So I will tell her that the placenta sends the messages to the mom’s body and changes the way this body functions to facilitate that the baby grows inside the belly and that these hormones, these messengers, can also enter the brain and produce changes that facilitate how well the mommy feels when she’s pregnant, that facilitates parturition, and that also facilitates the bonding with the baby.

Michael Feigelson So these aren’t just physical changes. The same signals that help grow the baby are also reaching the brain. And in there, a lot is happening.

Michael Feigelson And what about this idea of plasticity? Could you explain it to her?

Susana Carmona So actually, when I was writing the book, Neuro-Maternal, I signed up for classes with my daughter to do pottery. So every Sunday morning, me and my daughter, well actually it was me and a bunch of kids doing pottery. But I was doing this pottery thing and while I was thinking about plasticity and then I came with this analogy that it helped me to explain that to my daughter. It’s like, you have this piece of, how do you call that?

Michael Feigelson Clay.

Susana Carmona Clay, you have this piece of clay and if you want to mold it you have to wet it a lot right so the more wet it is the easier it is that your fingers can like shape this piece so I told her it’s like you know like gestational hormones might be like imagine that your brain is the claim gestational or months might be this extra water and the baby interaction is like the the fingers, like shaping it, right?

Michael Feigelson So pregnancy makes the brain more moldable and the baby does the shaping. First in utero, sending signals to the mom’s body and then out in the world through our interactions with the baby.

Susana Carmona At first, we thought that once you pass adolescence, this piece of clay was entering to the oven and just like stays there forever and it’s not changeable. You can just do like little changes on that. But that was already fixed because it went into the oven. So once you enter into adolescence then your brain might be kind of stable, right? But now we know that no, it didn’t get into the oven. If you wet it again, this piece, as much as you did during pregnancy, you can also mold it again. It’s another window of plasticity. And this molding comes with interacting with the baby.

Michael Feigelson So it becomes as plastic as it is during adolescence?

Susana Carmona Now we can say with the data we have right now that your brain changed more during pregnancy than it did so during adolescence. So in 2019 we performed a study in which we compared the brain of women before they got pregnant and then after parturition, in which we compared brain changes during pregnancy to those during adolescences, and we used to say that as plastic as during adolescence, now I know that the brain changes more during pregnancy than it did so during adolescence, at least in a faster rate. Because now that we have data during pregnancy, we know that the brain goes down in volume and then slightly recovers and by two months postpartum it has already recovered a lot of what was – I don’t like to say “lost” – but what was pruned or taken out.

Michael Feigelson So this was the first big discovery. Pregnancy and infant care wasn’t just affecting the body, it was reshaping the brain, and not in small ways. So the obvious next question became, okay, what exactly is it changing?

Michael Feigelson I wanna ask you to take me into a woman’s brain during several moments and describe what you saw in your research in each period. So during the first trimester of pregnancy, what do you see in that period?

Susana Carmona So… I will try to reformulate that to what we see in terms of neuronatomy, right? Like how the structure of the brain changes. And what we found is like there are decreases in gray metabolic volume that start already in the first trimester and then go down, down, and then slightly recover during the postpartum period. And those changes, they affect the complete brain, but they are more pronounced. In networks such as this network called a Default Mode Network, that is basically your internal thoughts, this little voice in your head that makes you mind wander and also helps you to think or reflect upon who you are and what other people might be thinking about this situation.

Michael Feigelson Parts of the brain are changing almost immediately, and the changes are especially concentrated in systems involved in attention, self-reflection, and understanding other people, what neuroscientists call the default mode network, which makes sense. Adapting the way we pay attention, reflect, our capacity to understand others, these all seem like important things to adjust when we need to take care of someone who can’t take care of themselves. But to understand how that works, Susanna says we still have to rely partly on a familiar scientific authority, rodents.

Susana Carmona If we look again to all these 50 years of animal research, we know that gestational hormones bind to specific receptors in a part of the brain known as hypothalamus, that is like the connection between your brain and your body. And once these hormones link to these receptors in the hypothalamus, two main things happen. One of them is pup stimuli that at first were interpreted as something to avoid or to ignore, like it’s kind of annoying, these little things crying or making noise. Suddenly, this avoiding circuit is turned off, and in parallel, another circuit known as mesolimbic dopaminergic circuit is turned on. This circuit is communicated through dopamine. So basically, the pup becomes like a provider of dopamine, like a highly motivating stimuli for the mother.

Michael Feigelson Let me see if I understand. So are you saying there’s a part of the brain that makes it possible to ignore things and that is no longer working? And then there’s another part of the brain that gives us stimuli, makes us excited or makes us motivated when we hear those things we can no longer ignore and that’s on.

Susana Carmona Yeah, more or less. So I would say not only ignore things, but that baby stimuli pass from being something to avoid, not just to ignore something to avoid, like those are very annoying sounds to suddenly become super salient, so salient that they can kidnap your attention. And once that happens, you have to be there with them. So yeah, basically, yes, it’s this switch in which baby stimuli become highly relevant and motivating, like it resonates on your body.

Michael Feigelson The brain is reallocating attention toward the crying, toward the feeding, toward the small vulnerable person and away from basically everything else.

Michael Feigelson A baby’s cry goes from being maybe a little annoying to the most motivating thing in the world?

Susana Carmona So being very annoying can also be very motivating to act, right? It’s not like good or bad, it’s like motivating. You have to do something because your body is like, your heart’s raising and you feel like sweating and you cannot hear the baby anymore because you’re starting to produce milk. Many mothers might feel that like just baby stimuli can make you produce milk, gestational hormones make you produce milk. And it doesn’t have to be yours. So, if you think about it, it’s… It’s kind of amazing.

Michael Feigelson Yeah, so maybe it’s better than to then to say from from something that I could ignore to the only thing I can hear.

Susana Carmona Yeah. And that, of course, has some detrimental effects on the way you perform on other tasks, right? Because if they’re kicking up your attention, how are you going to pay attention where you leave the keys?

Michael Feigelson This raises the question of “mommy brain”, but not in the way the cultural meme has led us to believe. The brain is not falling apart, it’s prioritizing, and it is doing it exceptionally well and incredibly fast.

Michael Feigelson And if you look five years after, what’s happened then?

Susana Carmona So we perform a study at six years postpartum, and some of the parts of the brain that changed during pregnancy do not go back to baseline. They are still different at six-years postpartum. But there’s another group of researchers. What they did was to use a database called the UK Biobank Database, and she analyzed like 12,000 women, middle-aged women, and they found that even at middle age, Pregnancy still leaves a trace on the brain and they found like changes in the sense that those women that had had children have what they call a younger looking brain. And the more children you have up to three, the younger your brain looks like. So that’s telling you that either pregnancy or childbearing have a profound effect on your brain and makes your brain look younger.

Michael Feigelson So some of these changes seem to be permanent. Years later, traces of pregnancy are still visible in the brain. And what does it look like years later? It makes the brain look younger, not what we’ve been led to believe. But when Susanna explains why this may be the case, it starts to make sense.

Michael Feigelson I know we don’t have the data, but theoretically, why would having a baby, taking care of everybody, make your. Brain younger.

Susana Carmona So there are two theories right now of why that might happen. One of them is more biological. And it says, like, when you get pregnant, your whole immune system and your endocrine system and your brain, now we know, change forever, right? And these changes makes that when the woman enters into the perimenopause, she enters in that period in a less inflammatory state. And that protects her for aging. So that’s the biological part. But then there’s also like this environmental part. Raising a child is like doing a constant Sudoku. So when you’re raising children you’re constantly trying to organize that, it’s also like training you and keeping you constantly active.

Michael Feigelson It’s like a workout for your brain.

Susana Carmona Yeah, exactly.

Michael Feigelson Perhaps this is a better way to think about these changes, a really intense, high stakes form of training like the Olympics. Except when Olympic athletes are in training, we accept that they need to be focused, that they will get exhausted, that there will be high highs and low lows. And that’s why we have coaches, nutritionists and fans.

Now, back in 2015, Susana and her colleagues were quite advanced in their seminal study. They were already clear about the incredible workout that pregnancy and infant care demands of the brain.

But on some level, it was still a bit abstract because while Susanna was studying these changes in other women, she hadn’t experienced them herself. Until one day she found out she was pregnant. And the questions she’d been asking in the lab started showing up in her own life.

Michael Feigelson Were you scanning your own brain while you’re going through all this?

Susana Carmona I would have scanned my brain if I could, but by the time I was pregnant, we had already collected the data. We started collecting the data in 2008, and I became pregnant in 2015. So, we were writing the paper and analyzing the data, but the data collection was already over when I got pregnant. Otherwise, I would have loved to see how my brain changed during pregnancy.

Michael Feigelson But you’ve said before you didn’t feel like you really needed to scan because you were so certain that you knew

Susana Carmona I mean, I was certain of the feelings I was having. I don’t need an MRI to tell me that I was changing, like the way I was reflecting upon myself and upon the world and upon many of my relations had changed. I don’t think women need an MRI scan to tell them that this is true, this is valid. But as a scientist, I would have loved to have my brain scanned.

Michael Feigelson And then Alex is born. And with her, Susanna is born as a mother. Believe it or not, even in that moment, she’s still thinking like a researcher.

Susana Carmona Something that I regret a little bit, and one of my students, I think she also regrets a little bit, we have this question on the questionnaires that we ask mothers, like, “when you first have your baby on your chest after parturition, what do you feel? Did you feel protection? Did you feel love? Did your feel rejection?” So we have like different options. And me, myself, and my students like the first time they had the baby, instead of really feeling it, it was like, “what would I answer to the questionnaire? Would I answer, we have like reject, fear, protection.” So that’s like the default mode network, getting in the way when it doesn’t have to, right? So.

Michael Feigelson So your questionnaire ruined this moment? Oh, yeah.

Susana Carmona I was thinking, what am I feeling? Instead of just letting it feel, it’s like expecting like, this is the moment, what’s gonna happen? And then I remember I put Alex on my chest and then I looked at her and she was like completely half of sleepy and she had with the eyes closed and suddenly she opened the eyes just for a brief second, like super dark eyes, nailing to my eyes and he’s like, like from now on, I’m gonna be like there, like.

Michael Feigelson You’re mine from now on.

Susana Carmona Your mind is mine. So I don’t know, I remember that very vividly. For just one second, she opened the eyes, looked at me directly for just five seconds, and then closed it again. I remember that moment as an inflection point in my life.

Michael Feigelson Throughout this episode, we’ve been talking about scans and hormones and dopamine circuits, but underneath all of that is something so much more recognizable. The feeling that parenthood changes the way you pay attention, the way think, the way relate to other people.

In a way, science is just catching up to the feelings many parents have experienced for hundreds of thousands of years. So the question is, how can understanding the science be helpful?

Michael Feigelson During pregnancy or after, was there ever a moment when you could feel yourself losing gray matter or the default mode network wasn’t working and you told yourself that story?

Susana Carmona So what I had were moments in which I tried to think from above and think like, what is this for? Like, I remember one day I was with Alex on the street. She was a baby and she started crying and crying and she wanted to eat. And I remember I opened the door, like my only focus was like, I have to feed this baby. And of course I couldn’t find the keys, but it’s not a memory thing. I wasn’t paying attention. Like all my attention was like a tuned out towards feeding the baby and the rest, it was like not important. What just happened? Why I don’t remember where I put the keys. It’s just that I have mommy brain or the fact that I was so focused into feeding Alex that I didn’t pay attention to where I left the keys or my purse or whatever. I just wanted to sit and make Alex stop crying. So that will be an example of it. And during pregnancy, what I thought is like, I was, especially in the second trimester where you have all these hormones that make you feel relaxed. So I was thinking, that might be the progesterone because life is very happy now. Like all the problems are gone. Yeah, like everybody’s so nice. And so I was thinking, is it the progesterone? Is it like the Default Mode Network getting less connections. So yeah, I was thinking about that a little bit. But of course when you’re feeling good, it’s hard to reflect on why you’re feeling good.

Michael Feigelson I think that first example is maybe an interesting case of how the science can be really helpful. Because what I heard you say, but correct me if I’m wrong, is that you forget the keys and you could have just followed the story you’ve been told and many women have been told, like I have mommy brain, I can’t remember, but because you knew some of the science, you said, no, I actually think this is what’s happening.

Susana Carmona Exactly.

Michael Feigelson Susanna’s work doesn’t minimize the fact that pregnancy and infant care is exhausting. In fact, it makes this point in a vivid and compelling way. And it doesn’t suggest that it’s easy either, as I’ve often heard her say, a plastic brain is also a vulnerable brain.

But it does offer an important reframing that some of the things we interpret as breakdown or decline may actually be adaptation to a different set of priorities. A process of fine-tuning. From the outside, a parent might look distracted, but internally, they’re running the cognitive equivalent of an air traffic control system.

Michael Feigelson You do still hear the, I’ve lost my neurons to children. What do you tell them when they say that?

Susana Carmona So actually I read that narrative, but there’s another one that says being a mom is like having 2,000 tabs open on your computer. So it’s like you’re having a lot of mental tasks. You’re having allot of things to do. So it is like you are trying to function with the same resources but doing a lot of other things and also knowing that most of these resources are going to be Talk to you soon. Or are gonna be able to be kidnapped by baby stimuli because the baby stimuli is super salient for the mother. So I will say like, yes, it’s true that during pregnancy and the first year of postpartum, the metabolic demands of pregnancy and lactation and the lack of sleep and the fact that the baby is very relevant to you might make you perform worse in other tasks or memory or attentional tasks, but you’re also learning a lot of other skills. In fact, you’re learning a lot, like your brain is floreciendo, like spurning, how you say that, Mike?

Michael Feigelson It’s kind of flourishing, it’s flowering.

Susana Carmona It’s flourishing a lot. You learn how to regulate your emotions, you learn how to read the mind of a non-verbal human being, you learn how to do a lot of things, like you learn to keep a human being alive, which is pretty, pretty important, much more important than where you left your keys.

Michael Feigelson So, what if we’ve been measuring the wrong thing? Because if your standard for is this brain working well is can I remember where my keys are, well then yes, parenthood may look like cognitive decline. But if the standard is, can I learn at an incredible speed to make sure our species can survive and thrive? Then suddenly the picture looks very different.

Michael Feigelson Hello? Hello?
Mom Hi Mike, hi.
Michael Feigelson Hi, where are you?
Mom Out with Louis.
Michael Feigelson I’m talking to someone who studies the maternal brain.
Mom The maternal brain?
Michael Feigelson Yeah, have you ever heard of “mom brain”? They call it “mom brain”.
Mom Not really, but uh…
Michael Feigelson What do you imagine it might mean?
Mom I probably means when a mother loses her attention span and it goes elsewhere because we have a lot of things to think about all the time, you know.
Michael Feigelson Yeah, and where is the attention, where do you think it goes in mom brain?
Mom What do you think? To your kids!
Michael Feigelson For how long?
Mom For how long? Well, you’re a grown man now calling me from a podcast and I’m still paying attention.
Michael Feigelson That’s fair enough, I appreciate it.
Mom Am I getting paid for this?
Michael Feigelson Uhhh…

Michael Feigelson To be clear, this is not a peer-reviewed study, but my mom’s point does line up with something Susanna has been saying throughout this conversation. The attention doesn’t disappear, it goes somewhere.

Michael Feigelson I wanted to share with you my hypothesis and have you react, which is that if babies are the first fastest learners on earth, that moms in the perinatal period would be second. Would you agree with that or not? Do you agree with that or not?

Susana Carmona Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. I like a lot, actually.

Michael Feigelson So defend it for me scientifically.

Susana Carmona That’s what I was gonna say. As a scientist, my role is to try to falsify it, right? So that’s what science is about. You have a theory and you try to prove this theory is false. If you fail, then the theory is true until it’s proven false. That’s how science works, how science is built, right. And in fact, there is a study. What they did was to assess memory. For instance, what we usually do is to tell the mother a list of words and she has to remember and then tell them back to me. So they did that, but instead of just using normal words, they used normal words and also words related to baby care. And what they found is that mothers perform words on memory tests when it’s not baby-related stimuli, but when they use baby- related stimuli, they outperform non-mothers. So I think it’s super interesting. I love it as a highlight because it reframes completely the narratives we have about motherhood. But from my personal perspective and from my story, I completely agree. So if I tell you without the scientific glasses, I will tell you that, yes, you are the second faster learner and you run this race together with a baby.

Michael Feigelson And if that’s true, well then the implications go way beyond parenting because this isn’t just learning how to change a diaper in complete darkness while whisper negotiating with a nonverbal human at 4 a.m. It’s learning how to read another human being, how to regulate yourself when things get overwhelming, how to stay present when it really matters, which raises a question, how far can we extend the use of these new skills?

Michael Feigelson And say, you know, you’re focused for a number of years on the baby and you are learning all of these things about theory of mind, about paying attention, about being present, and then they get a bit older, they don’t need quite as much from us. Do you think you can use these skills in other parts of your life?

Susana Carmona I think those are the more useful skills you can ever learn. Being a parent is like having a master in humanity, and having a Master in humanity is the most important knowledge you can have as a human being, right? So you learn like the basics from the beginning, it’s like learning the human being from the very beginning, right, like from the very beginning of the story, learning how a human being grows and starts to regulate the emotions and how they react to other emotions, how people can synchronize on the different emotions or contagious each other. So they tell you a lot of skills, like how to deal with frustration, and those are transversal, right? You can apply that to different spheres of your life. Work is one of them, and especially work in which you work with human resources. You have to interact, how to deal with motivations. I think it’s a very useful knowledge.

Michael Feigelson But if you really follow this idea all the way through, it leads to a slightly uncomfortable thought, at least for me, that some of these changes, some of this depth of connection might not be available to everyone.

Michael Feigelson One of the reactions I had to reading your book was to get upset, a little bit angry, and kind of jealous, because I felt like you were saying there’s this extraordinary change that happens to the mom’s brain and body that allows them to bond with another human in a way that no one else can feel and that that experience is not available to me. So what’s your reaction to my jealousy?

Susana Carmona That I totally understand you and that it’s normal that you’re jealous because it’s wonderful to have a baby inside your belly. It’s wonderful to see and feel the baby having hiccups and giving you like patadas, like kicks. It is amazing to deliver the baby, it’s like extreme and can be a very empowering process. And yeah you should be jealous, you should be jealous.

Michael Feigelson Scientifically speaking, you should be jealous is a pretty unusual answer. And to be fair, Susanna has taught me that one part of the story is pregnancy, but the other is caregiving. And that caregiving in men and women, in biological parents and adoptive parents, is also a pathway that can produce profound physiological change.

But what she’s also saying is that the experience of pregnancy and childbirth is unique. Physically, neurologically, hormonally, spiritually. Something is happening in the body and the brain that changes how a person experiences another human being. And for most of history, we talked about it in mystical terms, but now slowly science is beginning to catch up.

Michael Feigelson You’ve been doing this for 20 years, almost 20 years?

Susana Carmona Yeah.

Michael Feigelson So now in new medical textbooks, are there heads on the pregnant bodies or not?

Susana Carmona Well, certainly on my presentations and on the presentations of my students, there is a head in there. There is a heading there. I have to check. I haven’t checked medical test results. But actually, when you search on the internet, this information pops up. There’s no longer like just changes on the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the musculoskeletal system. They also talk about brain changes. And they are in there even at Wikipedia or when you ask AI about physiological changes during pregnancy, the brain is in there, which is already a very important milestone, right?

Michael Feigelson For a long time, we studied pregnancy like the brain wasn’t part of the story, as if becoming a parent was something that happened everywhere but in the mind.

Meanwhile, neuroscientists were busy writing papers about taxi drivers in London because they knew where Baker Street was. And look, spatial navigation is important, but what Susanna and her colleagues have shown is that pregnancy produces, neurologically speaking, the most profound changes we know of in adult life.

A process that changes what we notice, what we remember, what we care about, and maybe even who we become.

Mothers, it turns out, are not the only ones whose biology changes. Next time on Birth of a Parent, the anthropologist who discovered that caring for a baby changes men’s hormones too, including his own.

Lee Gettler We do know that the dads who are the most involved, spending the most time with their kids, have meaningfully lower testosterone, about 20% lower than the dads who are reporting basically not spending any time doing hands-on caregiving or helping to be kind of responsible for their children in that kind of caregiving way where they’re directly engaging with them.

Michael Feigelson If you’d like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.