The line is borrowed from Conjectures and Refutations, a foundational work in the philosophy of science published in 1963 by Karl Popper. Carmona picks up the gauntlet. She begins with the tenacious myth that mothers’ brains turn to mush the moment a baby begins to grow in their wombs, a cognitive fog that stretches into their final years.
Then she spends the rest of the book complicating and reframing it. For nearly two decades, Carmona, a neuroscientist, has been studying how motherhood remodels the female brain. In 2017, following publication of a landmark study in Nature Neuroscience, she established the Neuromaternal lab at the Instituto de Investigación Biomédica del Hospital Gregorio Marañón in Madrid.
Read more: “The Placenta Is More Powerful and Mysterious Than You Think” Motherhood, she has found, remaps the cortex, enhances plasticity, and triggers changes that not only cement the mother-baby bond and profoundly alter a mother’s sense of self, but can improve her well-being. A mother herself, Carmona weaves some of her own experiences into the narrative of her new book, giving her findings a first-person immediacy. I spoke with Carmona recently about how motherhood is like adolescence, whether non-gestational mothers can experience some of the cognitive benefits of motherhood, and how little we understand about perinatal depression.
So far, our research suggests that memory deficits are restricted to the third trimester and the first years postpartum, but that over the long-term, there are improvements to cognitive function. We also learn a lot from the process of mothering: cognitive flexibility, tolerance for frustration, negotiation, working as a team, all skills that are very relevant not only for our personal life, but our professional life. A friend once told me she sees being a parent as doing a masters in humanity, because you see how everyone functions from scratch, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and how to deal with them.
Why do the myths about mommy brain persist? Part of that comes because a high percentage of women report that their memory is not as it used to be. The problem is when you take that anecdote and turn it into a slogan, but you don’t get into the potential mechanism behind it.
Until very recently, it was just something that we kept on repeating: “You have mommy brain.” What our research group is trying to do is to evaluate that from a scientific perspective and understand the biological mechanisms, because gestation is metabolically demanding, and breastfeeding, too. A lack of sleep makes things worse. It doesn’t matter if you’re a mother or not.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
