Love nourishes a new mother's brain

By Martin Merzer on 10/25/2010 @ 10:39 AM

We may not be able to draw any sweeping policy conclusions from the following report, but it certainly generates a knowing smile:

A new mother's brain tends to grow larger in the months following the birth of her child, according to an article posted on Time Magazine's Healthland website.

Researchers at Cornell University found that the growth became evident within four months of birth and was concentrated in mid-brain regions associated with experiencing pleasure and in the pre-frontal cortex, an area linked to reasoning, planning and judgment.

The study, published in Behavioral Neuroscience, found that new mothers who seemed to take more pleasure and joy in their role as parents experienced the most evident growth in the emotion-processing regions of their brains.

You can read the entire article here and an abstract of the study here. Then, please join the discussion in our Comments section below.