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Pregnancy Alters Woman's Brains 'For At Least Two Years' (bbc.com)
EzInKy writes: The BBC and others are reporting the results of a study that women's brains do in fact change during pregnancy. BBC reports: "Pregnancy reduces grey matter in specific parts of a woman's brain, helping her bond with her baby and prepare for the demands of motherhood. Scans of 25 first-time mums showed these structural brain changes lasted for at least two years after giving birth. European researchers said the scale of brain changes during pregnancy were akin to those seen during adolescence. But they found no evidence of women's memory deteriorating. This study, from researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Leiden University and published in Nature Neuroscience, looked at the brain scans of women before they became pregnant, soon after they gave birth, and two years later, to see how the brain changed. And they compared these women's brains with those of 19 first-time fathers, 17 men without children and 20 women who had never given birth. The researchers found 'substantial' reductions in the volume of grey matter in the brains of first-time mothers. The grey matter changes occurred in areas of the brain involved in social interactions used for attributing thoughts and feelings to other people -- known as 'theory-of-mind' tasks. The researchers thought this would give new mothers an advantage in various ways - help them recognize the needs of their child, be more aware of potential social threats and become more attached to their baby." Thanks Mom! As for first-time fathers, the researchers found no changes in their grey matter.
So much for the feminazis out there claiming that there is no difference between a male and female brain, and that what constitute gender is nothing but a social construct.
Wow, mommy so proud. Keep it up, honey.
Men's suffer a life-long 50% IQ drop when they reach puberty.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I've contended for years that the female sense of humor is located in the placenta: it's ejected and discarded just after birth. It's funny - laugh (because it's true).
Posted AC to thwart the humorless male femnazis.
I remember when my first wife was pregnant with our first child. At the time I had an Amiga 500 and enjoyed playing games on it. My wife, who absolutely despised computer games suddenly became interested in them about three months into her pregnancy. I remember her getting hooked on New Zealand Story.
Of course, once the child was born all hope of playing computer games was abandoned by both of us.
All the moms around here call it "baby brain." The memory thing that most moms (and dads) experience just has to be sleep deprivation. When I did basic training they cut us back to 5 hours of sleep a night for weeks, but that was to show us that we could still function on that little sleep. When I became a father, I was getting two sessions of about 2 to 2.5 hours of sleep per night, for months. The latter was definitely much worse and affects everything - mood, work, and relationships. The mom also has (a) many more social pressures to be the "perfect" mom - (thanks Facebook), (b) tons of weird hormone changes going on, (c) physical trauma from the birth, (d) a weird combination of stress and mind numbing boredom, and (e) whatever this "baby brain" thing is. It absolutely sucks for her (and sometimes seems to manifest as anger), so she's going to take all that shit out on someone, and as the father you're the only one that's handy, so you get to grin and bear it. Over the course of several years things do improve a lot. It never goes back to the way things were though - sometimes too many things get said, too much animosity and frustration build up. People can hold grudges for a long time.
Nobody can really be prepared for being a parent. Even if you're told all the stuff to expect, it doesn't sink in until you're actually in the situation, and at that point there's nothing you can do but take a deep breath and do your best.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Men must be killed because their emissions cause damage to the female brain.
Was this written by a baby brain? Does this super intelligent sci-fi woman have multiple baby brains?
If you want to witness the effect of the work of Obama friend Merkel, look at Berlin.
"the only hope left" of the NY finance tools. Merkel.
Nice to see SoylentNews had this same article up several hours before Slashdot. The tide is turning.
Yea, no those things have to eat every hour when they first come out and freak out when mom isn't around. The only way they get any normalcy back is through a great support structure, which comes from having a partner that doesn't make the kind of dumbass assumptions mentioned here..
There's an implied subject: Men's [brains] suffer a life-long 50% IQ drop when they reach puberty.
Slashdot never fails to deliver.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The worst thing about being white is I have to share my "race" with dopey cunts like you.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
You extrapolate behavior which men exhibit towards other men to women?!?!? You think that the "initiation rites" that every male group [on the playground, in the office, in the football club, the motor gang, the army ect.] does on new members of said group are also applied to women?
What ARE you smoking? I want some of it.....
43 years I am on this planet and I still wait to see examples of "rampant" men bulling/harassing/rejecting/demeaning/abusing women around me. Never happened - primary school, secondary school, university, companies, army, social life...only very few occasions by drunken men in bars or on the street who were a) no danger at all since they'd even have hard time standing straight, let alone attacking a woman and b)immediately put in check by all other men in the vicinity...
I really have no idea where are all those people that see aggression/violence/abuse all the time by all men live but it isn't the planet I am on, that's for sure...
My oldest's 17th birthday is today - I promise you this lasts at least 17 years. Ugh.
I think grandkids cause their brain to just melt or something.
By the way, for the old-timers - the 17 year old was 5 days old when we saved Hotmail.
Do you have ESP?
So, you take before and after scans and attribute the difference to "pregnancy". That's pretty broad. Women do a lot of things differently when pregnant, and they are less active. Did you control for all that? Then you assert the difference in scans helps mothers bond and anticipate baby needs... basing this assertion on... maybe a dream you had?
Why does this garbage get posted here? This is feel-good nonsense, not science.
Why women are worse drivers AFTER having a baby. Why women seem to complain more AFTER having a baby. Why women....(continue on as needed). for the ultra sensitive...yes, this was meant as HUMOR
It's been shown the gay men's brain activity change when they become parents, matching in some ways changes in mothers' brains, and they definitely don't go through a pregnancy.
The researchers could have compared to brains of women who got babies via a surrogate mother, which would have been more interesting, but they chose instead to compare to groups which obviously won't have relevant changes.
Also, they looked at scans only before and after the pregnancy, which makes this research quite useless in determining changes during pregnancy. It could be that these changes occur at or near birth.
All in all, looks to me like a waste of research money.
An otherwise perfectly qualified man has lost his job of running Harvard University for merely suggesting, men and women could be different in some respects:
Even closer to the point in TFA, this year Donald Trump was widely denounced for stating (back in 2004), that an employee's pregnancy is an inconvenience for the employer. Hillary Clinton, portraying herself as a pillar of feminism (pay no attention to her husband's sexual predations), chose to use that obvious and unremarkable true statement to attack her opponent.
You may think, no one "gives a shit", but her billion-dollar campaign did enough research to believe, there is enough of an audience, who'll defecate bricks over it. And they did...
Nobody intends to stop "faminazis" from exercising their First Amendment rights. We are just pointing out, their rants are wrong.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"As for first-time fathers, the researchers found no changes in their grey matter."
Because men lose grey matter on first hooking up with the woman.
Perhaps not driving, but it actually does explain certain changes in thought processes after having kids. I've noticed that some women become hyper-protective after having kids, with an exaggerated fear of every theoretical danger. Of course, humans are not particularly good at understanding probability to begin with, so I always assumed that this perception was just confirmation bias on my part, or at most was the result of social conditioning (being around other hyper-protective people making people hyper-protective).
When you look at this in conjunction with the study that compared liberal and conservative brains, however, this study paints a different picture. That study showed that conservatives had more grey matter in the amygdala (the fear center) and less grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex (the part of brain that handles complexity). Although this study doesn't show increased grey matter in the amygdala, it does show less grey matter in the angular cingulate cortex (among other parts) with no reduction in the amygdala to balance that out. Based on that, it stands to reason that these female brain changes during pregnancy make mothers more protective of their offspring, thus at least historically improving the odds of the survival of the species.
The question, then, is whether this grey matter loss can be prevented. As an advanced society, we aren't constantly running from predators, and we don't need those same sorts of relative increases in fear response after pregnancy. These days, those changes mostly harm society by creating helicopter parents that harm social development of their offspring. If we could find a way to prevent this grey matter loss, we would likely improve society immensely.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No shit... Either this comment was made by a childless douchebag or he's in the running for world's shittiest baby daddy. That being said, after pushing out two for me, my wife did start exercising while I took care of my boys. Now she looks amazing, weighs less than before the kiddos, and I get lots of loving.
The mothers go batshit crazy...not necessarily in a bad or good way, just a giant deviation for the person you married.
Sometimes that sticks, too.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Slashdot never fails to deliver.
This is not the misogyny you're looking for
"But they found no evidence of women's memory deteriorating."
No shit? I'd say memory goes quite the opposite direction here....
Probably also explains the depression issues and potential for break-ups around pregnancy related issues.
These huge changes could break already breaking relationships, or make the stress of daily life bubble up to extreme proportions and that's why they just snap and lose control of everything.
Good that they've figured that out. Maybe they can check for that during or near pregnancy to figure out if a person is likely of going nuts or depressed and tackle it.
The issues of the mother being of ill mental health are bad enough, but the effects on the child are more of an issue, so calming them down and putting them in a good place for as long as possible will certainly aid both the run-up to the pregnancy and hopefully after it.
Good luck seeing that happen, though.
Sounds like a study conducted by men for men. LOL
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
"Ooooh, yess, YuCuddlyWubblyLiddlThing ..."
Sound pretty brain-altered to me. :-))
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
tl;dr - This totally explains "Won't someone think of the children?!?!?!"
The worst thing about being a human is to share the Universe with the stupid and with the anti-individualistic collectivists, with people who want to steal from you, with the jealous. As to the comment you replied to, do you honestly believe the dopey cunts are only in the 'white' population?
You can't handle the truth.
Landwhale detected.
Henceforth, I want to racially identify myself as "off-white" to allow others to separate me from the "alt-right."
Power to the beige people!
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
You want to see an altered brain, wait for menopause. Then run. Don't look back, just run.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Actually the research means nothing. The sample sizes were too small to be able to draw any kind of inference besides that the researchers wanted that delicious grant money and the people who approved it didn't mind squandering the funds, given the fundamentally flawed nature of the so-called study. Probably a certain amount was kicked back to them under the table because as anyone who knows anything about scientific research knows, your sample size doesn't have to be large to impress people with how MUCH research you did, it has to be large to allow for statistical analysis, for probing and interrogating anomalies, for being able to control for any one of literally thousands of factors that can skew the results in any arbitrarily chosen or even accidental direction.
When the sample size is too small, you simply can't do that; I'll put it another way maybe the average slashdotter can comprehend: you're trying to prove something by showing someone a picture of something. If the picture is a close-up of a patch of grass, it is easy to infer things about THAT patch, though that tells you virtually nothing about the state of the entire grounds. A wide-angle view from a distance tells you more about the state of the grounds, but can lack detail about the health of individual plants. You need a very high quality photograph, or better still, hundreds of very high quality photos from a large number of angles and positions, covering representative samples of the entire grounds, taken with a calibrated camera and known references for type and quality of lighting, kind of film, settings of the camera, (or brand of "digital camera" if you like, in high resolution,) the times of day and year in which the photos were taken, and also preferably many photos taken over a long period of time to be able to draw conclusions about something like the area's suitability to sustain various kinds of plants, if the photos are your only source of information. If that is, you can't also send various soil samples, air quality samples, ground water samples away for analysis.
What you have here is a collection of grainy, blurry photos of what is alleged to be Bigfoot, taken by someone's friend's coworker's uncle Steve, using a fixed-focus, or "focus free" (hahaha) disposable camera that sat in his glove compartment for an unspecified period of time, in 1979, or maybe it was 1994... when did we all hitchhike to Big Sur?
I'll consider their reports when they've actually done a real study, not the Playskol version of it.
Because all the women I know went batshit crazy about month 8 of the pregnancy and never looked back.
Everyone I ever met ended up in a divorce. The smart ones never married again.
Watching married females accelerate the death of their husbands has convinced me that if you want to have a Life, never get married or have children.
researchers found that the parents weren't nearly as happy as they claimed they were. Their kids caused them all kinds of stress and unhappiness.
Perhaps its a distinction between joy and happiness? Joy being the macro positive feelings associated with being a part of something bigger (i.e. raising a child, building a legacy through them, satisfaction of ego, that weird love thing) versus happiness which is focused on the general condition of the person day to day (sleep deprivation, resource sacrifice, emotional and psychological strain, etc.).
"Actually the research means nothing."
Exactly. Mod parent up.
Also, in all the developed countries, women in the U.S. are the least happy. (I've done a lot of research about that.) Any experimental test is affected by their unhappiness. Although women in the U.S. commonly blame men, much of their unhappiness is because of the way they live, not because of men.