Not only does a mother’s capacity for love grow after giving birth, but now researchers are saying that her brain grows as well. The American Psychological Association released a small study in its October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, which connects the growth to the change in hormone levels after birth. The particular areas within the brain that expand after birth are within the areas associated with behavior and motivation. In essence, this study suggests that a new mother’s desire to look after her baby may be driven by the brain’s expansion more so than instinct. Though, I come from the school of thought that our brains and the rest of our body are our tools that can also serve as our instinct. I think that this study is good to post as a reminder as to how intuitive the female body really is if it is given the freedom to follow its cycle.

Within the group of women who were evaluated, the mothers who had more enthusiasm for their babies had the largest growth. The researchers suggested that mothers who suffer from postpartum depression might experience reductions, instead of growth. The study compared MRI images of 19 women (average 33 years old) that were taken two to three weeks and three to four months after they gave birth at Yale-New Haven Hospital, in Connecticut. All of the women were breast-feeding (though the frequency was not specified in the article I came across), nearly half had other children and none had postpartum depression. What was not mentioned in detail was the context in which each of these women gave birth. It would be interesting to see how they established the difference between the enthusiastic mothers and non. Further more, it would be interesting to see amongst those women, who had a natural birth, utilized medication and/or had a c-section. These various birth story outcomes could be linked to the levels of oxytocin (the love/bonding hormone) existent in the mother at the time of birth.

Small yet significant increases in gray matter volume in various parts of the brain were discovered as well during this study. The increases occurred in the areas associated with maternal motivation (hypothalamus), reward and emotion processing (substantia nigra and amygdala), sensory integration (parietal lobe) and reasoning and judgment (prefrontal cortex). This small yet significant change is quite telling for significant learning is an effect of growth of gray matter.