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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.
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.
That statement is both sexist and grammatically incorrect. Turn yourself in to the nearest SJW re-education camp.
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..
And it has 16 comments. Well done Soylent News!
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
Does this super intelligent sci-fi woman have multiple baby brains?
What are you actually talking about?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Did you also write that on a wall, in shit?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
Tried a few times. The comments are fugly. If they sort that, I'm in.
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?
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.
If you have a random sampling of women of different backgrounds and interests, you're already controlling for most variables. A lot of similarities become randomized; the remainder can be idenitfied as a part of pregnancy, as they're likely behavioral changes caused as a part of the process, like nesting behavior in pregnant animals which don't build nests when not preparing to reproduce.
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"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
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?!?!?!"
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!!!"
and grammatically incorrect. Turn yourself in to the nearest SJW re-education camp.
wait sjws are grammer nazi's now?
irregardless of your opinion sjws are not ultamately responsible for every evil in the world even though some people believe that for all intensive purposes they are. It does peek my curiosity though. Do you really believe that? maybe i will pore over your posts to see.
I awate your response with baited breath.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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.).
I'm not sure you read my comment carefully. Perhaps it's my fault for using "control". My point is that to attribute it to "pregnancy", you'd need to, as just one example, show it isn't just the result of low physical activity. I am not referring to the kind of control you seem to be thinking based on your response. Hope that clarification helps.
I think "low physical activity" is common enough and well-studied enough that we know what it does and can identify that there's a different outcome here. Fat, lazy bitches don't act like new mothers.
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If you think that is justification, then you have not been paying attention to outright reversals in nutrition and health science over the last two decades.
"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.