Ep. 2 - The Mom Brain Revolution (with Susana Carmona) - Birth of a Parent

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[00:01]
Susana Carmona
Send their foundation.
[00:07]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
What was, until that time, the scientific consensus. So, for example, what did they teach about the impact of pregnancy on the brain in medical textbooks?
[00:21]
Susana Carmona
Nothing. I'll tell you what the textbook looks like. So if you open a textbook about the physiology and obstetrics and gynecologists, have you seen these illustrations in which you see, like, how the body of a woman changes when she's pregnant? Haven't you noticed? They don't even have a head. We don't even have a head.
[00:42]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So you're saying that they cut the head off in the pictures, they literally
[00:46]
Susana Carmona
cut the woman's head off. And even when you see the mechanisms of parturition, it's like it contains a baby and it has to take out the baby, nothing else.
[00:57]
Narrator
So this is where the story begins. A headless image of a pregnant woman. Because up until very recently, that's more or less how pregnancy had been studied. Hello?
[01:09]
Mike's Mom
What?
[01:34]
Narrator
This podcast begins with a simple idea. When a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents, brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole. This is Birth of a Parent. And our guest today is Susana Carmona, a neuroscientist who was one of the first people to study how pregnancy and infant care shapes the brain in lasting, measurable ways. She is the director of the Neuromaternal Lab in Madrid and author of a book about her discoveries, A Mother's Brain, the New Science of the Neuromaternal Revolution. But before any of that, there was a car ride.
[02:36]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Okay, so you're studying the brain, you're studying neuroscience. How do you come to decide to study the maternal brain?
[02:45]
Susana Carmona
One day in 2008, November 2008, we were driving in a car, and I was driving two of my friends and PhD students, El Salina Huxema and Erika Varva, and we were talking about our studies on meditation, before meditation and after meditation. And the results were not really, really cool. At some point during the conversation, Erika told us that she wanted to become a mother. So we start talking in a personal manner, like, how will it be to become a mother? And at some point, she. She said, why don't we study mothers?
[03:18]
Narrator
It sounds so obvious now, but turns out at the time, no one had really asked the question.
[03:25]
Susana Carmona
Honestly, when we had this idea, we thought that, of course, somebody would have studied already what happens in the brain of a woman when she becomes Pregnant. But when we got into the lab and we started searching on Padmet, we realized that there were a lot of studies on animal models, on rats and mice. There was one study from the, like, I think it was 1860, something like centuries ago, studying a part of the brain in diseased women. And then another study of preeclampsia. That's all, nothing else.
[04:00]
Narrator
So for several centuries, almost all the research about the impact of pregnancy on the maternal brain had been done on rodents. Human mothers were studied only from the neck down. The brain was completely absent.
[04:15]
Susana Carmona
Like, if you search for any other type of process, you will find a lot of studies and a lot of revisions. But for motherhood, there was like an empty field, a complete field to explore. And we started fantasizing about how can we answer this question? And the question was, like, would the brain of a woman change when she becomes a mother?
[04:34]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Just to make sure. I get it, you're talking about the research. Erica tells you she wants to be a mom, and instead of going out for dinner or wherever you're going, you go to the lab and start searching up a database to find out what's going on. And you figure out that they've only done these studies on rats, basically. Do you remember anything about the conversation in the lab?
[04:58]
Susana Carmona
I really remember the excitement, the hours, like, thinking how to improve what was already done. One building after the other, and we couldn't stop. So we were so motivated. This just started as a normal conversation and like a game, right? But we were so, so excited that we decided that same day that we will talk to the director of the program and ask them, please, please, please, we should do this without funding, at extra times, at extra hours. And we promised we wouldn't left the other studies behind, but we should really answer these questions.
[05:32]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So as women, weren't you angry that nothing was available, that they only studied rats?
[05:36]
Susana Carmona
So if I'm honest, at that time, I was not. I was not angry. I was more excited, like, okay, nobody has studied that we should do that now. I'm very angry. But this madness, it's also very motivating. So, you know, it's like, I'm so angry that I really want to figure out.
[05:55]
Narrator
It's an interesting combination. On the one hand, there's the excitement, a sense that you've stumbled onto something no one has looked at before, and on the other, the realization that no one has looked at this before. We're not talking about something obscure here. This is pregnancy, the most extreme physiological event in human life. An experience shared by most women on the planet. And the one thing humans truly can't live without. And yet, for decades, if you wanted to understand what was happening in the brain during pregnancy and your best bet was to look at a rat, why
[06:33]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
do you think nobody had studied this before?
[06:36]
Susana Carmona
Oh, for many reasons. So one of them is like, you know, there's this bias in biomedical research related to women. Like for many years they were excluded from medical trials just to prevent potential dangers for women that might be pregnant. So that meant that women from 16 to 50 something were completely excluded from the study. So we have built this biomedical knowledge bias towards male's body. And that's very dangerous, especially now that we use AI and we train AI based on what we have so far. And we are like losing half of the population. And also because. And now I realize how difficult it is to really study the brain of a woman when she becomes pregnant. At first we were very naive. We thought, okay, so she wants to get pregnant. I have this friend. So in nine months, 10 months, we will end up with the study. But those studies are super expensive and super time consuming. So we started a study in 2008, and the publication came nine years later. That's a lot of time.
[07:36]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
And what about the idea that. Because for a long time we believed that the brain changes in childhood, but then it stops changing. Do you think that's part of the
[07:44]
Narrator
reason or not really, it could be.
[07:47]
Susana Carmona
I haven't thought about this that way, but many other processes have been studied. You have studies about how the brain of a taxi driver in London changes. So I don't think it was because of that. It was just ignore or not important, not relevant. You know, sometimes I got like, you do these mommy things, right? You study these mommy things as if it was not important. And actually it's the most profound physiological change. And now we know that also at the neural level is the most profound neural change in adulthood.
[08:22]
Narrator
So it wasn't that the brain couldn't change. We knew it could. We just chose some more interesting subjects. London taxi drivers, for example. But the brain of a pregnant woman, that was treated more like a side project, or worse, a mommy thing, Until Susannah and her colleagues decided to take it seriously. And what they found was not subtle. The brain doesn't just change during pregnancy, it changes dramatically. In fact, as Susannah and her colleagues would later discover, it changes even more than it does during adolescence.
[09:01]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
If you had to explain to your daughter what happened in your brain when you were pregnant with her, how would you do that?
[09:08]
Susana Carmona
Oui, how Would I do that? So I would tell her that the placenta sends messages to the mom's body and change the way this body functions to facilitate that the baby grows inside the belly, and that these hormones, these messengers, can also enter the brain and produce changes that facilitate how well the mommy feels when she's pregnant. That facilitates parturition, and that also facilitates the bonding with the baby.
[09:38]
Narrator
So these aren't just physical changes. The same signals that help grow the baby are. Are also reaching the brain. And in there, a lot is happening.
[09:50]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
And what about this idea of plasticity? Could you explain it to her?
[09:55]
Susana Carmona
So actually, when I was writing the book Neuromaternal, I signed up for classes with my daughter to do pottery. So every Sunday morning, me and my daughter. Well, actually, it was me and a bunch of kids doing pottery, but I was doing this pottery thing. And, well, I was thinking about plasticity. And then I came with this analogy that it helped me to explain that to my daughter. It's like you have this piece of. How do you call that?
[10:24]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Clay.
[10:25]
Susana Carmona
Clay. You have this piece of clay, and if you want to mold it, you have to wet it a lot, right? So the more wet it is, the easier it is that your fingers can, like, shape this piece. So I told her it's like, you know, like gestational hormones might be like, imagine that your brain is the clan. Gestational hormones might be like this extra water. And the baby interaction is like the fingers, like, shaping it, right?
[10:52]
Narrator
So pregnancy makes the brain more moldable, and the baby does the shaping first in utero, sending signals to the mom's body and then out in the world through our interactions with the baby.
[11:04]
Susana Carmona
At first, we thought that once you pass adolescence, this piece of clay was entered into the oven and just stays there forever. And it's not changeable. You can just do little changes on that. But that was already fixed because it went into the oven. So once you enter into the adolescence, then your brain might be kind of stable, right? But now we know that, no, it didn't get into the oven. If you wet it again, this piece, as much as you did during pregnancy, you can also mold it again. It's another window of plasticity. And this malding comes with interacting with the baby.
[11:40]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So it becomes as plastic as it is during adolescence.
[11:44]
Susana Carmona
Now we can say with the data we have right now that your brain changed more during pregnancy than it did so during adolescence. So in 2019, we performed a study in which we compared the brain of women before they got pregnant and then after Parturition, in which we compare brain changes during pregnancy to those during adolescence. And we used to say that as plastic as during adolescence. Now I know that the brain changes more during pregnancy than it did so during adolescence, at least in a faster rate. Because now that we have data during pregnancy, we know that the brain goes down in volume and then slightly recovers. And by two months postpartum, it has already recovered a lot of what was, I don't like to say lost, but what was pruned or take it out.
[12:34]
Narrator
So this was the first big discovery. Pregnancy and infant care wasn't just affecting the body. It was reshaping the brain, and not in small ways. So the obvious next question became, okay, what exactly is it changing?
[12:50]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I want to ask you to take me into a woman's brain during several moments and describe what you saw in your research in each period. So during the first trimester of pregnancy, what do you see in that period?
[13:02]
Susana Carmona
So I will try to reformulate that to what we see in terms of neuroanatomy, how the structure of the brain changes. What we found is there are decreases in gray matter volume that start already in the first trimester and then go down, down, down, and then slightly recover during the postpartum period. Those changes, they affect the complete brain, but they are more pronounced in networks, such as this network called the deformal network. That is basically your internal thoughts, these little voice on your head that makes you mind wander and also helps you to think or reflect upon who you are and what other people might be thinking about this situation.
[13:46]
Narrator
Parts of the brain are changing almost immediately, and the changes are especially concentrated in systems involved in attention, self reflection, and understanding other people. What neuroscientists call the default mode network, which makes sense adapting the way we pay attention reflect our capacity to understand others. These all seem like important things to adjust when we need to take care of someone who can't take care of themselves. But to understand how that works, Susannah says we still have to rely partly on. On a familiar scientific authority, rodents.
[14:29]
Susana Carmona
If we look again to all these 50 years of animal research, we know that gestational hormones bind to specific receptors in a part of the brain known as hypothalamus that is like the connection between your brain and your body. And once these hormones link to these receptors in the hypothalamus, two main things happen. One of them is Pap stimuli that at first were interpreted as something to avoid or to ignore. Like, it's kind of annoying, these little things crying and making noise. Suddenly this avoidance circuit is turned off, and in parallel, another circuit known as mesolimbic dopaminergic circuit, is turned on. This circuit is communicated through dopamine. So basically, the pup becomes like a provider of dopamine, like a highly motivating stimuli for the mother.
[15:17]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Let me see if I understand. So are you saying there's a part of the brain that makes it possible to ignore things and that is no longer working, and then there's another part of the brain that gives us stimuli, makes us excited, or makes us motivated when we hear those things we can no longer ignore, and that's on.
[15:41]
Susana Carmona
Yeah, more or less. So I would say not only ignore things, but that baby stimuli pass from being something to avoid, not just to ignore something to avoid. Like, those are very annoying sounds to suddenly become super salient. So salient that they can kidnap your attention. And once that happens, you have to be there with them. So, yeah, basically, yes. It's this switch in which baby stimuli become highly relevant and motivating. Like, it resonates on your body.
[16:14]
Narrator
The brain is reallocating attention toward the crying, toward the feeding, toward the small, vulnerable person, and away from basically everything else.
[16:24]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
A baby's cry goes from being maybe a little annoying to the most motivating thing in the world.
[16:30]
Susana Carmona
Yeah. So being very annoying can also be very motivating to act. Right. It's not like, good or bad. It's like, motivating. You have to do something because your body is like, your heart's raising and you feel like sweating, and you cannot hear the baby anymore because you're starting to produce milk. Many mothers might feel that, like, just baby stimuli can make you produce milk. Gestational hormones make you produce milk, and it doesn't have to be yours. So if you think about it, it's kind of amazing.
[17:01]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So maybe it's better than to say, from something that I could ignore to the only thing I can hear.
[17:07]
Susana Carmona
Yeah. And that, of course, has some detrimental effects on the way you perform on other tasks. Right. Because if they kidnap your attention, how are you going to pay attention on where you left the keys?
[17:18]
Narrator
This raises the question of mommy brain, but not in the way the cultural meme has led us to believe. The brain is not falling apart. It's prioritizing, and it is doing it exceptionally well and incredibly fast.
[17:32]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
And if you look five years after what's happened then.
[17:37]
Susana Carmona
So we perform a study at six years postpartum. And some of the parts of the brain that change during pregnancy do not go back to baseline. They are still different at six years postpartum. But there's another group of researchers. What they did was to use a database called the UK Biobank database. And she analyzes like 12,000 women, middle aged women, and they found that even at middle age, pregnancy still leave a trace on the brain. And they found changes in the sense that those women that had had children have what they call a younger looking brain. And the more children you have up to three, the younger your brain looks like. So that's telling you that either pregnancy or child rearing have a profound effect on your brain and makes your brain look younger.
[18:29]
Narrator
So some of these changes seem to be permanent. Years later, traces of pregnancy are still visible in the brain. And what does it look like years later? It makes the brain look younger. Not what we've been led to believe. But when Susannah explains why this may be the case, it starts to make sense.
[18:50]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I know we don't have the data, but theoretically, why would having a baby, taking care of a baby make your brain younger?
[19:00]
Susana Carmona
So there are two theories right now of why that might happen. One of them is more biological and, and it says like when you get pregnant, your whole immune system and your endocrine system and your brain now we know, change forever, right? And these changes makes that when the woman enters into the perimenopause, she enters in that period in a less inflammatory state and that protects her for aging. So that's the biological part. But then there's also like this environmental part, like raising a child is like doing a constant Sudoku. So when you're raising children, you're constantly trying to organize that. It's also training you and keeping you constantly active.
[19:47]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
It's like a workout for your brain.
[19:48]
Susana Carmona
Yeah, exactly.
[19:51]
Narrator
Perhaps this is a better way to think about these changes. A really intense, high stakes form of training, like the Olympics. Except when Olympic athletes are in training, we accept that they need to be focused, that they will get exhausted, that there will be high highs and low lows. And that's why we have coaches, nutritionists and fans. Now, back in 2015, Susannah and her colleagues were quite advanced in their seminal study. They were already clear about the incredible workout that pregnancy and infant care demands of the brain. But on some level, it was still a bit abstract, because while Susannah was studying these changes in other women, she hadn't experienced them herself. Until one day she found out she was pregnant. And the questions she'd been asking in the lab started showing up in her own life.
[20:47]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Were you scanning your own brain while you're going through all this, I would
[20:51]
Susana Carmona
have scanned my brain if I could, but by the time I was pregnant, we have already collected the data. Right. So we started collecting the data in 2008, and I became pregnant in 2015. So we were writing the paper and analyzing the data, but the data collection was already over when I got pregnant. Otherwise, I would have loved to see my brain, how my brain changed during pregnancy.
[21:14]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
But no, but you've said before you didn't feel like you really needed to scan because you were so certain that you knew.
[21:22]
Susana Carmona
I mean, I was certain of the feelings I was having. I don't need an MRI to tell me that I was changing. Like, the way I was, like, reflecting upon myself and upon the world and upon many of my relations had changed. I don't think women need an MRI scan to tell them that this is true, this is valid. But as a scientist, I would have loved to have my brain scanned.
[21:45]
Narrator
And then Alex is born, and with her, Susannah is born as a mother. Believe it or not, even in that moment, she's still thinking like a researcher.
[21:56]
Susana Carmona
Something that I regret a little bit. And one of my students, I think she also regrets a little bit. We have this question on the questionnaires that we ask mothers, like, when you first have your baby on your chest after parturition, what do you feel? Did you feel protection? Did you feel loved? Did you feel rejection? So we have different options. And me, myself and my students, the first time they had the baby, instead of really feeling it, it was like, what would I answer to the questionnaire? Would I answer, will I have reject fear protection? So that's like the default mode network getting read when it doesn't have to.
[22:31]
Mike's Mom
Right.
[22:32]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So your questionnaire ruined this moment.
[22:34]
Susana Carmona
Yeah, I was thinking, what am I feeling? Instead of just letting it feel, it's like expecting, this is the moment, what's going to happen? And then I remember I put Alex on my chest and then I look at her and she was like completely half of sleeping with the eyes closed. And suddenly she opened the eyes just for a brief second, like super dark eyes, kneeling to my eyes. And he's like, like, from now on, I'm going to be like, there, like, you're mine. From now on, your mind is mine. Yeah. So I don't know. I remember that very vividly. Like for just one second, she opened the eyes, look at me directly for just like five seconds, and then close it again. I remember that moment as like an inflection point in my life.
[23:23]
Narrator
Throughout this episode, we've been talking about Scans and hormones and dopamine circuits. But underneath all of that is something so much more recognizable. The feeling that parenthood changes the way you pay attention, the way you think, the way you relate to other people. In a way, science is just catching up to the feelings many parents have experienced for hundreds of thousands of years. So the question is, how can understanding the science be helpful
[23:54]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
during pregnancy or after? Was there ever a moment when you could feel yourself losing gray matter? The default mode network wasn't working, and you told yourself that story.
[24:06]
Susana Carmona
So what I had were moments in which I tried to think from above and think, like, what is this for? Like, I remember one day I was with Alex on the street. She was a baby, and she started crying and crying, and she wanted to eat. And I remember I opened the door, like, my only focus was, like, I have to feed this baby. And of course, I couldn't find the kids. But it's not a memory thing. I wasn't paying attention. Like, my. All my attention was, like, towards feeding the baby, and the rest was not important. What just happened, why I don't remember where I put the kiss. It's just that I have mommy brain. Or the fact that I was so focused into feeding Alex that I didn't pay attention to where I left the keys or my purse or whatever. I just wanted to sit and make Alex stop crying. So that will be an example of it. And during pregnancy, what I thought is, like, I was. Especially during the second trimester, where you have all these hormones that make you feel relaxed. So I was thinking that might be the progesterone, because life is very happy now. Like, all the problems are gone. Yeah, like, everybody's so nice. And so I was thinking, is it the progesterone? Is it like the hormone network getting, like, less connection? So, yeah, I was thinking about. About that a little bit. But of course, when you're feeling good, it's hard to reflect why you're feeling good.
[25:33]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I think that first example is maybe an interesting case of how the science can be really helpful. Because what I heard you say, but correct me if I'm wrong, is that you forget the keys, and you could have just followed the story you've been told. And many women have been told, like, I have mommy brain.
[25:52]
Narrator
I can't remember.
[25:53]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
But because you knew some of the science, you said, no, I actually think this is what's happening exactly.
[26:01]
Narrator
Susannah's work doesn't minimize the fact that pregnancy and infant care is exhausting. In fact, it makes this point in a vivid and compelling way. And it doesn't suggest that it's easy either. As I've often heard her say, a plastic brain is also a vulnerable brain. But it does offer an important reframing that some of the things we interpret as breakdown or decline may actually be adaptation to a different set of priorities, a process of fine tuning. From the outside, a parent might look distracted, but internally they're running the cognitive equivalent of an air traffic control system.
[26:44]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
You do still hear the I've lost my neurons to children. What do you tell them when they say that?
[26:50]
Susana Carmona
So actually I read that narrative, but there's another one that says being a mom is like having 2,000 tabs open on your computer. So it's like you're having a lot of mental task, you're having a lot of things to do. So it's like you're trying to function with the same resources but doing a lot of other things and also knowing that most of these resources are going to be focused or are going to be able to be kidnapped by baby stimuli because the baby stimuli is super salient for the mother. So I will say, like, yes, it's true that during pregnancy and the first year postpartum, the metabolic demands of pregnancy and lactation and the lack of sleep and the fact that the baby is very relevant to you might make you perform worse in other tasks or memory or attentional task. But you're also learning a lot of other skills. In fact, you're learning a lot. Like your brain is floreciendo, like spurning. How you say that, Mike?
[27:51]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Sort of flourishing.
[27:52]
Susana Carmona
It's flowering, Flourishing a lot. Right? You learn how to regulate your emotions. You learn how to read the mind of a non verbal human being. You learn how to do a lot of things. Like you learn to keep a human being alive, which is pretty, pretty important. Much more important than where you left your kiss.
[28:13]
Narrator
So what if we've been measuring the wrong thing? Because if your standard for is this brain working well is can I remember where my keys are? Well, then yes, parenthood may look like cognitive decline. But if the standard is can I learn at an incredible speed to make sure our species can survive and thrive, then suddenly the picture looks very.
[28:41]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Hello?
[28:42]
Susana Carmona
Hello?
[28:43]
Mike's Mom
Hi, Mike. Hi.
[28:44]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Hi. Where are you?
[28:46]
Mike's Mom
Out with Louie.
[28:48]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I'm talking to someone who studies the maternal brain.
[28:52]
Mike's Mom
The maternal brain.
[28:54]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Yeah. Have you ever heard of mom brain? They call it mom brain.
[28:58]
Mike's Mom
Not really.
[28:59]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
But what do you imagine it might mean?
[29:03]
Mike's Mom
It probably means when a mother loses her attention span and it goes elsewhere because we have a lot of things to think about, the time, you know.
[29:11]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Yeah. And where does the attention, where do
[29:13]
Narrator
you think it goes in mom brain?
[29:16]
Mike's Mom
Where do you think? To your kids?
[29:18]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
For how long?
[29:21]
Mike's Mom
For how long? Well, you're a grown man now, calling me from a podcast, and I'm still paying attention.
[29:27]
Narrator
That's fair.
[29:28]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Fair enough. I appreciate it.
[29:31]
Mike's Mom
Am I getting paid for this?
[29:38]
Narrator
To be clear, this is not a peer reviewed study. But my mom's point does line up
[29:42]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
with something Susannah has been saying throughout this conversation.
[29:46]
Narrator
The attention doesn't disappear. It goes somewhere.
[29:50]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I wanted to share with you my hypothesis and have you react, which is that if babies are the first fastest learners on earth, that moms in the perinatal period would be second. Would you agree with that or not?
[30:06]
Susana Carmona
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. I like it a lot, actually.
[30:10]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So defend it for me scientifically.
[30:12]
Susana Carmona
That's what I was going to say. As a scientist, my role is to try to false it. Right. So that's what science is about. You have a theory and you try to prove this theory is false. If you fail, then the theory is true until it's proven false. That's how science works, how science is built. Right. And in fact, there is a study. What they did was to assess memory. For instance, what we usually do is to tell the mother a list of words and she has to remember and then tell them back to me. Right. So they did that, but instead of just using normal words, they used normal words and also words related to baby care. And what they found is that mothers perform worse on memory tests when it's not baby related stimuli, but when they use baby related stimuli, they outperform non mothers. So I think it's super interesting. I love it as a highlight because it refrains completely the narratives we have about motherhood. But from my personal perspective and from my story, I completely agree. So if I tell you without the scientific glasses, I will tell you that, yes, you're the second faster learner and you run this race together with a baby.
[31:25]
Narrator
And if that's true, well, then the implications go way beyond parenting. Because this isn't just learning how to change a diaper in complete darkness while whisper negotiating with a Nonverbal human at 4am it's learning how to read another human being, how to regulate yourself when things get overwhelming, how to stay present when it really matters. Which raises a question. How far can we extend the use
[31:51]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
of these new skills and say, you know, you're focused for a number of years on the baby and you are learning all of These things about theory of mind, about paying attention, about being present. And then they get a bit older. They don't need quite as much from us. Do you think you can use these skills in other parts of your life?
[32:15]
Susana Carmona
Totally. I think those are the more useful skills you can ever learn. Being a parent is like having a master in humanity. And having a master in humanity is the most important knowledge you can have as a human being. Right. So you learn the basics from the beginning. It's like learning the human being from the very beginning. Right. Like from the beginning of the story, learning how a human being grows and starts to regulate the emotions and how they react to other emotions, how people can synchronize on the different emotions or contagious each others. So they tell you a lot of skills, like how to deal with frustration. And those are transversal. Right. You can apply that to different spheres of your life. Work is one of them. And especially working with you work with human resources. You have to interact how to deal with motivations. Yeah, I think it's very useful knowledge.
[33:13]
Narrator
But if you really follow this idea all the way through, it leads to a slightly uncomfortable thought, at least for me, that some of these changes, some of this depth of connection might not be available to everyone.
[33:29]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
One of the reactions I had to reading your book was to get upset, a little bit angry and kind of jealous because I felt like you were saying there's this extraordinary change that happens to the mom's brain and body that allows them to bond with another human and in a way that no one else can feel. And that that experience is not available to me. So what's your reaction to my jealousy?
[34:00]
Susana Carmona
That I totally understand you and that it's normal that you're jealous because it's wonderful to have a baby inside your belly. It's wonderful to see and feel the baby having hiccup and giving you like patadas, like kicks. It's amazing to deliver the baby. It's like extreme and can be very empowering process. And yeah, you should be jealous. You should be jealous.
[34:29]
Narrator
Scientifically speaking, you should be jealous is a pretty unusual answer. And to be fair, Susannah has taught me that one part of the story is pregnancy, but the other is caregiving. And that caregiving in men and women, in biological parents and adoptive parents, is also a pathway that can produce profound physiological change. But what she's also saying is that the experience of pregnancy and childbirth is unique. Physically, neurologically, hormonally, spiritually. Something is happening in the body and the brain that changes how A person experiences another human being. And for most of history, the we talked about it in mystical terms. But now, slowly, science is beginning to catch up.
[35:16]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
You've been doing this for 20 years. Almost 20 years, yeah. So now, in new medical textbooks, are there heads on the pregnant bodies or not?
[35:26]
Susana Carmona
Well, certainly on my presentations and on the presentations of my students, there is a head in there. There is a head in there. I have to check. I haven't checked medical tests, but actually, when you search on the Internet, this information pops up. There's no longer, like, just changes at the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the musculoskeletal system. They also talk about brain changes, and they are in there. Even at Wikipedia. Or when you ask AI about physiological changes during pregnancy, the brain is in there, which is already a very important milestone. Right.
[36:03]
Narrator
For a long time, we studied pregnancy like the brain wasn't part of the story, as if becoming a parent was something that happened everywhere but in the mind. Meanwhile, neuroscientists were busy writing papers about taxi drivers in London because they knew where Baker street was. And look, spatial navigation is important. But what Susannah and her colleagues have shown is that pregnancy produces, neurologically speaking, the most profound changes we know of in adult life, a process that changes what we notice, what we remember, what we care about, and maybe even who we become. Mothers, it turns out, are not the only ones whose biology changes. Next time on Birth of a Parent, the anthropologist who discovered that caring for a baby changes men's hormones too, including his own.
[37:13]
Anthropologist Guest
We do know that the dads who are the most involved, spending the most time with their kids have meaningfully lower testosterone, about 20% lower than the dads who are reporting basically not spending any time doing hands on caregiving or helping to be kind of responsible for their children in that kind of caregiving way where they're directly engaging with them.
[37:37]
Narrator
If you'd like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.
[37:50]
Susana Carmona
This podcast is part of Early Childhood Matters, the storytelling platform published by the Van Leer Foundation.

Summary7 min read

Birth of a Parent – Episode 2: The Mom Brain Revolution

Podcast: Early Childhood Matters with Michael Feigelson
Guest: Dr. Susana Carmona, Neuroscientist and Director, Neuromaternal Lab
Date: July 22, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode dives into groundbreaking science on how pregnancy and motherhood reshape the adult human brain—sometimes more than any other stage since adolescence. Host Michael Feigelson talks with Dr. Susana Carmona, one of the first researchers to map these neurological changes in humans, about her journey, discoveries, and what it really means to have “mom brain.” The discussion reframes parenthood as not a period of decline or forgetfulness, but a unique, powerful adaptation: a revolution in the mind as a new parent is born.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Historical Scientific Blind Spot – "No Head on the Mother"

The Missing Brain in Obstetrics
- Medical textbooks on pregnancy typically show illustrations of headless pregnant women, symbolizing how the brain’s role in pregnancy has been ignored.
  - Quote:
    
    “If you open a textbook about physiology and obstetrics…you see how the body of a woman changes when she’s pregnant…[but] they don’t even have a head.”
    – Susana Carmona (00:20)
- Carmona's team was among the first to wonder if—and how—the maternal brain changes, after finding virtually no prior human studies, only animal models.
Cultural Bias and Research Gaps
- Women were excluded from many medical trials, leading to male-focused biomedical knowledge. Studying pregnant women’s brains is logistically and financially challenging, which compounded the lack of research.
  - Quote:
    
    “We have built this biomedical knowledge bias towards male’s body. And that’s very dangerous…we are losing half of the population.”
    – Susana Carmona (06:36)

2. Pregnancy as a Window of Adult Brain Plasticity

Discovery: The Brain Changes Profoundly in Pregnancy
- The maternal brain changes—structurally and functionally—more during pregnancy than even in adolescence.
  - Quote:
    
    “Now we can say with the data we have right now that your brain changed more during pregnancy than it did so during adolescence.”
    – Susana Carmona (11:44)
How and Why
- Pregnancy triggers neuroplasticity, making brain tissue more “moldable.” Susana uses a pottery analogy: gestational hormones “wet the clay,” making it ready to be shaped by baby-related stimuli and interaction.
  - Quote:
    
    “Gestational hormones might be like this extra water. And the baby interaction is like the fingers, shaping it.”
    – Susana Carmona (10:24)
Default Mode Network
- Structural changes—early loss, later partial recovery of grey matter—especially affect brain circuits for self-reflection, empathy, and social cognition (the “default mode network”).
Functional Reallocation
- The brain shifts so baby-related stimuli (cries, needs) become almost irresistible, hijacking attention and motivation networks.
  - Quote:
    
    “Baby stimuli become highly relevant and motivating. It resonates on your body.”
    – Susana Carmona (16:13)

3. "Mommy Brain": Decline or Super-Adaptation?

Not Cognitive Loss, But Prioritization
- Forgetfulness (where are my keys?) is not evidence of decline, but selective attention: the brain is hyper-tuned to the baby.
  - Quote:
    
    “If they kidnap your attention, how are you going to pay attention [to] where you left the keys?”
    – Susana Carmona (17:07)
Empirical Support
- Studies found mothers perform worse on memory tests with unrelated words, but outperform non-mothers on tests using baby-related words.
  - Quote:
    
    “When they use baby related stimuli, they outperform non-mothers...it reframes completely the narratives we have about motherhood.”
    – Susana Carmona (31:11)
Metaphor for Modern Parents
- “Being a mom is like having 2,000 tabs open on your computer.”
  – Susana Carmona (26:50)
- Quote:
  
  “You learn to keep a human being alive, which is pretty, pretty important. Much more important than where you left your keys.”
  – Susana Carmona (27:51)

4. Long-Term Effects and Brain “Youth”

Lasting Changes, Even Years Later
- Brain changes from pregnancy endure for years; even six years postpartum, differences remain. Some studies (e.g., UK Biobank) show mothers’ brains appear “younger,” with the effect increasing up to three children.
  - Quote:
    
    “Those women that had had children have what they call a younger looking brain… the more children you have up to three, the younger your brain looks like.”
    – Susana Carmona (17:37)
Why? Biological and Cognitive Reasons
- Less inflammation post-pregnancy and constant cognitive “workouts” in parenting both likely contribute to this ‘youthful’ brain.

5. The Personal Experience – Scientist Becomes a Mother

Living the Research
- When Carmona herself became pregnant after years of research, she noticed the cognitive focus, the changes, the lived reality—beyond scanning.
  - Quote:
    
    “I don’t need an MRI to tell me that I was changing...The way I was reflecting upon myself and the world...had changed.”
    – Susana Carmona (21:21)
- Touching moment described when her daughter opens her eyes for the first time.
  - Quote:
    
    “For just one second, she opened the eyes, looked at me directly for just like five seconds, and then closed it again. I remember that moment as like an inflection point in my life.”
    – Susana Carmona (23:05)
Science Helps Reframe Experience
- Knowing the neuroscience allowed Carmona to see key-forgetting or feeling “off” as attention adaptation, not failure or pathology.

6. Transferring Parental Brain Skills Beyond Parenting

New Skills, New “Masters in Humanity”
- The networks and skills honed during early parenthood (empathy, patience, theory of mind, emotional regulation) transfer to other domains—work, relationships, life.
  - Quote:
    
    “Being a parent is like having a master in humanity…those are transversal. You can apply that to different spheres of life.”
    – Susana Carmona (32:14)

7. The Uniqueness of Maternal Transformation and Caregiving for All

Mother’s Unique Experience
- Pregnancy and childbirth confer a kind of neurological “initiation” unavailable through other means, and it’s okay to feel “jealous,” as the host admits.
  - Quote:
    
    “You should be jealous. You should be jealous.”
    – Susana Carmona (34:00)
- But caregiving (for any parent, including adoptive fathers) can also trigger profound brain changes—an upcoming episode will explore paternal brain shifts.

8. Rewriting the Textbooks

A New Scientific Era
- The recognition of maternal brain change is now making its way into popular knowledge, AI search results, and even medical curricula.
  - Quote:
    
    “There is a head in [my presentations] now. Even at Wikipedia...they also talk about brain changes, which is already a very important milestone.”
    – Susana Carmona (35:26)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

“We were so motivated…we decided that same day that we would talk to the director of the program and ask them, please, please, please, we should do this without funding, at extra times, at extra hours.”
– Susana Carmona (04:58)
“The brain goes down in volume and then slightly recovers…and by two months postpartum, it has already recovered a lot of what was…pruned or taken out.”
– Susana Carmona (12:12)
“A plastic brain is also a vulnerable brain.”
– Narrator (26:01)
“If your standard for is this brain working well is can I remember where my keys are?…But if the standard is can I learn at an incredible speed to make sure our species can survive and thrive, then suddenly the picture looks very [different].”
– Narrator (28:13)
Mike’s Mom, quipped: “Well, you’re a grown man now, calling me from a podcast, and I’m still paying attention.”
– Mike’s Mom (29:20)

Timestamps for Key Segments

00:20 — Susana highlights missing “heads” in textbooks; scientific blind spot revealed.
02:45 — Carmona describes how the idea to study mothers began by accident, and the shock at how little research existed.
06:36 — Discussion of why biomedical research overlooked maternal brain changes.
10:24 — Clay metaphor: how pregnancy makes the maternal brain “moldable”.
11:44 — Groundbreaking finding: maternal brain changes more than in adolescence.
13:01–14:28 — What happens in the brain through the trimesters; focus on “default mode network”.
16:13–17:07 — How baby stimuli “kidnap” attention; the real origin of “mommy brain”.
17:37–19:00 — Lasting changes—brains look “younger” years after birth.
21:21–23:05 — Carmona’s emotional account of first bonding with her daughter.
26:50–27:51 — “2,000 tabs” metaphor and what parents are actually learning.
31:11 — Cognitive tests: mothers better memory for baby-related words.
32:14 — Parenting as a “master in humanity”—skills extend to broader life.
34:00 — On male jealousy and uniqueness of maternal experience.
35:26 — Are there now “heads” on pregnant bodies in textbooks? Progress in science.

Language and Tone

The conversation is approachable, vivid, and thoughtful, combining scientific detail with metaphors and humor. Real-life anecdotes (from both Carmona and the host) deepen the episode’s connection to listeners, while clear, plain language demystifies complex neuroscience.

Summary – Why Listen?

This episode challenges clichés about “mom brain,” revealing the science behind the radical, lifelong transformation of the maternal brain. Carmona's insights celebrate the intelligence of caregiving, the power of parental adaptation, and the evolutionary marvel of growing a new mind while nurturing a new life. Whether a parent or curious bystander, listeners will find a richer, more dignified way to understand themselves and those who care for the next generation.

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Transcript117 lines

[00:01]
Susana Carmona
Send their foundation.
[00:07]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
What was, until that time, the scientific consensus. So, for example, what did they teach about the impact of pregnancy on the brain in medical textbooks?
[00:21]
Susana Carmona
Nothing. I'll tell you what the textbook looks like. So if you open a textbook about the physiology and obstetrics and gynecologists, have you seen these illustrations in which you see, like, how the body of a woman changes when she's pregnant? Haven't you noticed? They don't even have a head. We don't even have a head.
[00:42]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So you're saying that they cut the head off in the pictures, they literally
[00:46]
Susana Carmona
cut the woman's head off. And even when you see the mechanisms of parturition, it's like it contains a baby and it has to take out the baby, nothing else.
[00:57]
Narrator
So this is where the story begins. A headless image of a pregnant woman. Because up until very recently, that's more or less how pregnancy had been studied. Hello?
[01:09]
Mike's Mom
What?
[01:34]
Narrator
This podcast begins with a simple idea. When a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents, brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole. This is Birth of a Parent. And our guest today is Susana Carmona, a neuroscientist who was one of the first people to study how pregnancy and infant care shapes the brain in lasting, measurable ways. She is the director of the Neuromaternal Lab in Madrid and author of a book about her discoveries, A Mother's Brain, the New Science of the Neuromaternal Revolution. But before any of that, there was a car ride.
[02:36]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Okay, so you're studying the brain, you're studying neuroscience. How do you come to decide to study the maternal brain?
[02:45]
Susana Carmona
One day in 2008, November 2008, we were driving in a car, and I was driving two of my friends and PhD students, El Salina Huxema and Erika Varva, and we were talking about our studies on meditation, before meditation and after meditation. And the results were not really, really cool. At some point during the conversation, Erika told us that she wanted to become a mother. So we start talking in a personal manner, like, how will it be to become a mother? And at some point, she. She said, why don't we study mothers?
[03:18]
Narrator
It sounds so obvious now, but turns out at the time, no one had really asked the question.
[03:25]
Susana Carmona
Honestly, when we had this idea, we thought that, of course, somebody would have studied already what happens in the brain of a woman when she becomes Pregnant. But when we got into the lab and we started searching on Padmet, we realized that there were a lot of studies on animal models, on rats and mice. There was one study from the, like, I think it was 1860, something like centuries ago, studying a part of the brain in diseased women. And then another study of preeclampsia. That's all, nothing else.
[04:00]
Narrator
So for several centuries, almost all the research about the impact of pregnancy on the maternal brain had been done on rodents. Human mothers were studied only from the neck down. The brain was completely absent.
[04:15]
Susana Carmona
Like, if you search for any other type of process, you will find a lot of studies and a lot of revisions. But for motherhood, there was like an empty field, a complete field to explore. And we started fantasizing about how can we answer this question? And the question was, like, would the brain of a woman change when she becomes a mother?
[04:34]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Just to make sure. I get it, you're talking about the research. Erica tells you she wants to be a mom, and instead of going out for dinner or wherever you're going, you go to the lab and start searching up a database to find out what's going on. And you figure out that they've only done these studies on rats, basically. Do you remember anything about the conversation in the lab?
[04:58]
Susana Carmona
I really remember the excitement, the hours, like, thinking how to improve what was already done. One building after the other, and we couldn't stop. So we were so motivated. This just started as a normal conversation and like a game, right? But we were so, so excited that we decided that same day that we will talk to the director of the program and ask them, please, please, please, we should do this without funding, at extra times, at extra hours. And we promised we wouldn't left the other studies behind, but we should really answer these questions.
[05:32]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So as women, weren't you angry that nothing was available, that they only studied rats?
[05:36]
Susana Carmona
So if I'm honest, at that time, I was not. I was not angry. I was more excited, like, okay, nobody has studied that we should do that now. I'm very angry. But this madness, it's also very motivating. So, you know, it's like, I'm so angry that I really want to figure out.
[05:55]
Narrator
It's an interesting combination. On the one hand, there's the excitement, a sense that you've stumbled onto something no one has looked at before, and on the other, the realization that no one has looked at this before. We're not talking about something obscure here. This is pregnancy, the most extreme physiological event in human life. An experience shared by most women on the planet. And the one thing humans truly can't live without. And yet, for decades, if you wanted to understand what was happening in the brain during pregnancy and your best bet was to look at a rat, why
[06:33]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
do you think nobody had studied this before?
[06:36]
Susana Carmona
Oh, for many reasons. So one of them is like, you know, there's this bias in biomedical research related to women. Like for many years they were excluded from medical trials just to prevent potential dangers for women that might be pregnant. So that meant that women from 16 to 50 something were completely excluded from the study. So we have built this biomedical knowledge bias towards male's body. And that's very dangerous, especially now that we use AI and we train AI based on what we have so far. And we are like losing half of the population. And also because. And now I realize how difficult it is to really study the brain of a woman when she becomes pregnant. At first we were very naive. We thought, okay, so she wants to get pregnant. I have this friend. So in nine months, 10 months, we will end up with the study. But those studies are super expensive and super time consuming. So we started a study in 2008, and the publication came nine years later. That's a lot of time.
[07:36]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
And what about the idea that. Because for a long time we believed that the brain changes in childhood, but then it stops changing. Do you think that's part of the
[07:44]
Narrator
reason or not really, it could be.
[07:47]
Susana Carmona
I haven't thought about this that way, but many other processes have been studied. You have studies about how the brain of a taxi driver in London changes. So I don't think it was because of that. It was just ignore or not important, not relevant. You know, sometimes I got like, you do these mommy things, right? You study these mommy things as if it was not important. And actually it's the most profound physiological change. And now we know that also at the neural level is the most profound neural change in adulthood.
[08:22]
Narrator
So it wasn't that the brain couldn't change. We knew it could. We just chose some more interesting subjects. London taxi drivers, for example. But the brain of a pregnant woman, that was treated more like a side project, or worse, a mommy thing, Until Susannah and her colleagues decided to take it seriously. And what they found was not subtle. The brain doesn't just change during pregnancy, it changes dramatically. In fact, as Susannah and her colleagues would later discover, it changes even more than it does during adolescence.
[09:01]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
If you had to explain to your daughter what happened in your brain when you were pregnant with her, how would you do that?
[09:08]
Susana Carmona
Oui, how Would I do that? So I would tell her that the placenta sends messages to the mom's body and change the way this body functions to facilitate that the baby grows inside the belly, and that these hormones, these messengers, can also enter the brain and produce changes that facilitate how well the mommy feels when she's pregnant. That facilitates parturition, and that also facilitates the bonding with the baby.
[09:38]
Narrator
So these aren't just physical changes. The same signals that help grow the baby are. Are also reaching the brain. And in there, a lot is happening.
[09:50]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
And what about this idea of plasticity? Could you explain it to her?
[09:55]
Susana Carmona
So actually, when I was writing the book Neuromaternal, I signed up for classes with my daughter to do pottery. So every Sunday morning, me and my daughter. Well, actually, it was me and a bunch of kids doing pottery, but I was doing this pottery thing. And, well, I was thinking about plasticity. And then I came with this analogy that it helped me to explain that to my daughter. It's like you have this piece of. How do you call that?
[10:24]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Clay.
[10:25]
Susana Carmona
Clay. You have this piece of clay, and if you want to mold it, you have to wet it a lot, right? So the more wet it is, the easier it is that your fingers can, like, shape this piece. So I told her it's like, you know, like gestational hormones might be like, imagine that your brain is the clan. Gestational hormones might be like this extra water. And the baby interaction is like the fingers, like, shaping it, right?
[10:52]
Narrator
So pregnancy makes the brain more moldable, and the baby does the shaping first in utero, sending signals to the mom's body and then out in the world through our interactions with the baby.
[11:04]
Susana Carmona
At first, we thought that once you pass adolescence, this piece of clay was entered into the oven and just stays there forever. And it's not changeable. You can just do little changes on that. But that was already fixed because it went into the oven. So once you enter into the adolescence, then your brain might be kind of stable, right? But now we know that, no, it didn't get into the oven. If you wet it again, this piece, as much as you did during pregnancy, you can also mold it again. It's another window of plasticity. And this malding comes with interacting with the baby.
[11:40]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So it becomes as plastic as it is during adolescence.
[11:44]
Susana Carmona
Now we can say with the data we have right now that your brain changed more during pregnancy than it did so during adolescence. So in 2019, we performed a study in which we compared the brain of women before they got pregnant and then after Parturition, in which we compare brain changes during pregnancy to those during adolescence. And we used to say that as plastic as during adolescence. Now I know that the brain changes more during pregnancy than it did so during adolescence, at least in a faster rate. Because now that we have data during pregnancy, we know that the brain goes down in volume and then slightly recovers. And by two months postpartum, it has already recovered a lot of what was, I don't like to say lost, but what was pruned or take it out.
[12:34]
Narrator
So this was the first big discovery. Pregnancy and infant care wasn't just affecting the body. It was reshaping the brain, and not in small ways. So the obvious next question became, okay, what exactly is it changing?
[12:50]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I want to ask you to take me into a woman's brain during several moments and describe what you saw in your research in each period. So during the first trimester of pregnancy, what do you see in that period?
[13:02]
Susana Carmona
So I will try to reformulate that to what we see in terms of neuroanatomy, how the structure of the brain changes. What we found is there are decreases in gray matter volume that start already in the first trimester and then go down, down, down, and then slightly recover during the postpartum period. Those changes, they affect the complete brain, but they are more pronounced in networks, such as this network called the deformal network. That is basically your internal thoughts, these little voice on your head that makes you mind wander and also helps you to think or reflect upon who you are and what other people might be thinking about this situation.
[13:46]
Narrator
Parts of the brain are changing almost immediately, and the changes are especially concentrated in systems involved in attention, self reflection, and understanding other people. What neuroscientists call the default mode network, which makes sense adapting the way we pay attention reflect our capacity to understand others. These all seem like important things to adjust when we need to take care of someone who can't take care of themselves. But to understand how that works, Susannah says we still have to rely partly on. On a familiar scientific authority, rodents.
[14:29]
Susana Carmona
If we look again to all these 50 years of animal research, we know that gestational hormones bind to specific receptors in a part of the brain known as hypothalamus that is like the connection between your brain and your body. And once these hormones link to these receptors in the hypothalamus, two main things happen. One of them is Pap stimuli that at first were interpreted as something to avoid or to ignore. Like, it's kind of annoying, these little things crying and making noise. Suddenly this avoidance circuit is turned off, and in parallel, another circuit known as mesolimbic dopaminergic circuit, is turned on. This circuit is communicated through dopamine. So basically, the pup becomes like a provider of dopamine, like a highly motivating stimuli for the mother.
[15:17]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Let me see if I understand. So are you saying there's a part of the brain that makes it possible to ignore things and that is no longer working, and then there's another part of the brain that gives us stimuli, makes us excited, or makes us motivated when we hear those things we can no longer ignore, and that's on.
[15:41]
Susana Carmona
Yeah, more or less. So I would say not only ignore things, but that baby stimuli pass from being something to avoid, not just to ignore something to avoid. Like, those are very annoying sounds to suddenly become super salient. So salient that they can kidnap your attention. And once that happens, you have to be there with them. So, yeah, basically, yes. It's this switch in which baby stimuli become highly relevant and motivating. Like, it resonates on your body.
[16:14]
Narrator
The brain is reallocating attention toward the crying, toward the feeding, toward the small, vulnerable person, and away from basically everything else.
[16:24]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
A baby's cry goes from being maybe a little annoying to the most motivating thing in the world.
[16:30]
Susana Carmona
Yeah. So being very annoying can also be very motivating to act. Right. It's not like, good or bad. It's like, motivating. You have to do something because your body is like, your heart's raising and you feel like sweating, and you cannot hear the baby anymore because you're starting to produce milk. Many mothers might feel that, like, just baby stimuli can make you produce milk. Gestational hormones make you produce milk, and it doesn't have to be yours. So if you think about it, it's kind of amazing.
[17:01]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So maybe it's better than to say, from something that I could ignore to the only thing I can hear.
[17:07]
Susana Carmona
Yeah. And that, of course, has some detrimental effects on the way you perform on other tasks. Right. Because if they kidnap your attention, how are you going to pay attention on where you left the keys?
[17:18]
Narrator
This raises the question of mommy brain, but not in the way the cultural meme has led us to believe. The brain is not falling apart. It's prioritizing, and it is doing it exceptionally well and incredibly fast.
[17:32]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
And if you look five years after what's happened then.
[17:37]
Susana Carmona
So we perform a study at six years postpartum. And some of the parts of the brain that change during pregnancy do not go back to baseline. They are still different at six years postpartum. But there's another group of researchers. What they did was to use a database called the UK Biobank database. And she analyzes like 12,000 women, middle aged women, and they found that even at middle age, pregnancy still leave a trace on the brain. And they found changes in the sense that those women that had had children have what they call a younger looking brain. And the more children you have up to three, the younger your brain looks like. So that's telling you that either pregnancy or child rearing have a profound effect on your brain and makes your brain look younger.
[18:29]
Narrator
So some of these changes seem to be permanent. Years later, traces of pregnancy are still visible in the brain. And what does it look like years later? It makes the brain look younger. Not what we've been led to believe. But when Susannah explains why this may be the case, it starts to make sense.
[18:50]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I know we don't have the data, but theoretically, why would having a baby, taking care of a baby make your brain younger?
[19:00]
Susana Carmona
So there are two theories right now of why that might happen. One of them is more biological and, and it says like when you get pregnant, your whole immune system and your endocrine system and your brain now we know, change forever, right? And these changes makes that when the woman enters into the perimenopause, she enters in that period in a less inflammatory state and that protects her for aging. So that's the biological part. But then there's also like this environmental part, like raising a child is like doing a constant Sudoku. So when you're raising children, you're constantly trying to organize that. It's also training you and keeping you constantly active.
[19:47]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
It's like a workout for your brain.
[19:48]
Susana Carmona
Yeah, exactly.
[19:51]
Narrator
Perhaps this is a better way to think about these changes. A really intense, high stakes form of training, like the Olympics. Except when Olympic athletes are in training, we accept that they need to be focused, that they will get exhausted, that there will be high highs and low lows. And that's why we have coaches, nutritionists and fans. Now, back in 2015, Susannah and her colleagues were quite advanced in their seminal study. They were already clear about the incredible workout that pregnancy and infant care demands of the brain. But on some level, it was still a bit abstract, because while Susannah was studying these changes in other women, she hadn't experienced them herself. Until one day she found out she was pregnant. And the questions she'd been asking in the lab started showing up in her own life.
[20:47]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Were you scanning your own brain while you're going through all this, I would
[20:51]
Susana Carmona
have scanned my brain if I could, but by the time I was pregnant, we have already collected the data. Right. So we started collecting the data in 2008, and I became pregnant in 2015. So we were writing the paper and analyzing the data, but the data collection was already over when I got pregnant. Otherwise, I would have loved to see my brain, how my brain changed during pregnancy.
[21:14]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
But no, but you've said before you didn't feel like you really needed to scan because you were so certain that you knew.
[21:22]
Susana Carmona
I mean, I was certain of the feelings I was having. I don't need an MRI to tell me that I was changing. Like, the way I was, like, reflecting upon myself and upon the world and upon many of my relations had changed. I don't think women need an MRI scan to tell them that this is true, this is valid. But as a scientist, I would have loved to have my brain scanned.
[21:45]
Narrator
And then Alex is born, and with her, Susannah is born as a mother. Believe it or not, even in that moment, she's still thinking like a researcher.
[21:56]
Susana Carmona
Something that I regret a little bit. And one of my students, I think she also regrets a little bit. We have this question on the questionnaires that we ask mothers, like, when you first have your baby on your chest after parturition, what do you feel? Did you feel protection? Did you feel loved? Did you feel rejection? So we have different options. And me, myself and my students, the first time they had the baby, instead of really feeling it, it was like, what would I answer to the questionnaire? Would I answer, will I have reject fear protection? So that's like the default mode network getting read when it doesn't have to.
[22:31]
Mike's Mom
Right.
[22:32]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So your questionnaire ruined this moment.
[22:34]
Susana Carmona
Yeah, I was thinking, what am I feeling? Instead of just letting it feel, it's like expecting, this is the moment, what's going to happen? And then I remember I put Alex on my chest and then I look at her and she was like completely half of sleeping with the eyes closed. And suddenly she opened the eyes just for a brief second, like super dark eyes, kneeling to my eyes. And he's like, like, from now on, I'm going to be like, there, like, you're mine. From now on, your mind is mine. Yeah. So I don't know. I remember that very vividly. Like for just one second, she opened the eyes, look at me directly for just like five seconds, and then close it again. I remember that moment as like an inflection point in my life.
[23:23]
Narrator
Throughout this episode, we've been talking about Scans and hormones and dopamine circuits. But underneath all of that is something so much more recognizable. The feeling that parenthood changes the way you pay attention, the way you think, the way you relate to other people. In a way, science is just catching up to the feelings many parents have experienced for hundreds of thousands of years. So the question is, how can understanding the science be helpful
[23:54]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
during pregnancy or after? Was there ever a moment when you could feel yourself losing gray matter? The default mode network wasn't working, and you told yourself that story.
[24:06]
Susana Carmona
So what I had were moments in which I tried to think from above and think, like, what is this for? Like, I remember one day I was with Alex on the street. She was a baby, and she started crying and crying, and she wanted to eat. And I remember I opened the door, like, my only focus was, like, I have to feed this baby. And of course, I couldn't find the kids. But it's not a memory thing. I wasn't paying attention. Like, my. All my attention was, like, towards feeding the baby, and the rest was not important. What just happened, why I don't remember where I put the kiss. It's just that I have mommy brain. Or the fact that I was so focused into feeding Alex that I didn't pay attention to where I left the keys or my purse or whatever. I just wanted to sit and make Alex stop crying. So that will be an example of it. And during pregnancy, what I thought is, like, I was. Especially during the second trimester, where you have all these hormones that make you feel relaxed. So I was thinking that might be the progesterone, because life is very happy now. Like, all the problems are gone. Yeah, like, everybody's so nice. And so I was thinking, is it the progesterone? Is it like the hormone network getting, like, less connection? So, yeah, I was thinking about. About that a little bit. But of course, when you're feeling good, it's hard to reflect why you're feeling good.
[25:33]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I think that first example is maybe an interesting case of how the science can be really helpful. Because what I heard you say, but correct me if I'm wrong, is that you forget the keys, and you could have just followed the story you've been told. And many women have been told, like, I have mommy brain.
[25:52]
Narrator
I can't remember.
[25:53]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
But because you knew some of the science, you said, no, I actually think this is what's happening exactly.
[26:01]
Narrator
Susannah's work doesn't minimize the fact that pregnancy and infant care is exhausting. In fact, it makes this point in a vivid and compelling way. And it doesn't suggest that it's easy either. As I've often heard her say, a plastic brain is also a vulnerable brain. But it does offer an important reframing that some of the things we interpret as breakdown or decline may actually be adaptation to a different set of priorities, a process of fine tuning. From the outside, a parent might look distracted, but internally they're running the cognitive equivalent of an air traffic control system.
[26:44]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
You do still hear the I've lost my neurons to children. What do you tell them when they say that?
[26:50]
Susana Carmona
So actually I read that narrative, but there's another one that says being a mom is like having 2,000 tabs open on your computer. So it's like you're having a lot of mental task, you're having a lot of things to do. So it's like you're trying to function with the same resources but doing a lot of other things and also knowing that most of these resources are going to be focused or are going to be able to be kidnapped by baby stimuli because the baby stimuli is super salient for the mother. So I will say, like, yes, it's true that during pregnancy and the first year postpartum, the metabolic demands of pregnancy and lactation and the lack of sleep and the fact that the baby is very relevant to you might make you perform worse in other tasks or memory or attentional task. But you're also learning a lot of other skills. In fact, you're learning a lot. Like your brain is floreciendo, like spurning. How you say that, Mike?
[27:51]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Sort of flourishing.
[27:52]
Susana Carmona
It's flowering, Flourishing a lot. Right? You learn how to regulate your emotions. You learn how to read the mind of a non verbal human being. You learn how to do a lot of things. Like you learn to keep a human being alive, which is pretty, pretty important. Much more important than where you left your kiss.
[28:13]
Narrator
So what if we've been measuring the wrong thing? Because if your standard for is this brain working well is can I remember where my keys are? Well, then yes, parenthood may look like cognitive decline. But if the standard is can I learn at an incredible speed to make sure our species can survive and thrive, then suddenly the picture looks very.
[28:41]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Hello?
[28:42]
Susana Carmona
Hello?
[28:43]
Mike's Mom
Hi, Mike. Hi.
[28:44]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Hi. Where are you?
[28:46]
Mike's Mom
Out with Louie.
[28:48]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I'm talking to someone who studies the maternal brain.
[28:52]
Mike's Mom
The maternal brain.
[28:54]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Yeah. Have you ever heard of mom brain? They call it mom brain.
[28:58]
Mike's Mom
Not really.
[28:59]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
But what do you imagine it might mean?
[29:03]
Mike's Mom
It probably means when a mother loses her attention span and it goes elsewhere because we have a lot of things to think about, the time, you know.
[29:11]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Yeah. And where does the attention, where do
[29:13]
Narrator
you think it goes in mom brain?
[29:16]
Mike's Mom
Where do you think? To your kids?
[29:18]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
For how long?
[29:21]
Mike's Mom
For how long? Well, you're a grown man now, calling me from a podcast, and I'm still paying attention.
[29:27]
Narrator
That's fair.
[29:28]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
Fair enough. I appreciate it.
[29:31]
Mike's Mom
Am I getting paid for this?
[29:38]
Narrator
To be clear, this is not a peer reviewed study. But my mom's point does line up
[29:42]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
with something Susannah has been saying throughout this conversation.
[29:46]
Narrator
The attention doesn't disappear. It goes somewhere.
[29:50]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
I wanted to share with you my hypothesis and have you react, which is that if babies are the first fastest learners on earth, that moms in the perinatal period would be second. Would you agree with that or not?
[30:06]
Susana Carmona
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. I like it a lot, actually.
[30:10]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
So defend it for me scientifically.
[30:12]
Susana Carmona
That's what I was going to say. As a scientist, my role is to try to false it. Right. So that's what science is about. You have a theory and you try to prove this theory is false. If you fail, then the theory is true until it's proven false. That's how science works, how science is built. Right. And in fact, there is a study. What they did was to assess memory. For instance, what we usually do is to tell the mother a list of words and she has to remember and then tell them back to me. Right. So they did that, but instead of just using normal words, they used normal words and also words related to baby care. And what they found is that mothers perform worse on memory tests when it's not baby related stimuli, but when they use baby related stimuli, they outperform non mothers. So I think it's super interesting. I love it as a highlight because it refrains completely the narratives we have about motherhood. But from my personal perspective and from my story, I completely agree. So if I tell you without the scientific glasses, I will tell you that, yes, you're the second faster learner and you run this race together with a baby.
[31:25]
Narrator
And if that's true, well, then the implications go way beyond parenting. Because this isn't just learning how to change a diaper in complete darkness while whisper negotiating with a Nonverbal human at 4am it's learning how to read another human being, how to regulate yourself when things get overwhelming, how to stay present when it really matters. Which raises a question. How far can we extend the use
[31:51]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
of these new skills and say, you know, you're focused for a number of years on the baby and you are learning all of These things about theory of mind, about paying attention, about being present. And then they get a bit older. They don't need quite as much from us. Do you think you can use these skills in other parts of your life?
[32:15]
Susana Carmona
Totally. I think those are the more useful skills you can ever learn. Being a parent is like having a master in humanity. And having a master in humanity is the most important knowledge you can have as a human being. Right. So you learn the basics from the beginning. It's like learning the human being from the very beginning. Right. Like from the beginning of the story, learning how a human being grows and starts to regulate the emotions and how they react to other emotions, how people can synchronize on the different emotions or contagious each others. So they tell you a lot of skills, like how to deal with frustration. And those are transversal. Right. You can apply that to different spheres of your life. Work is one of them. And especially working with you work with human resources. You have to interact how to deal with motivations. Yeah, I think it's very useful knowledge.
[33:13]
Narrator
But if you really follow this idea all the way through, it leads to a slightly uncomfortable thought, at least for me, that some of these changes, some of this depth of connection might not be available to everyone.
[33:29]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
One of the reactions I had to reading your book was to get upset, a little bit angry and kind of jealous because I felt like you were saying there's this extraordinary change that happens to the mom's brain and body that allows them to bond with another human and in a way that no one else can feel. And that that experience is not available to me. So what's your reaction to my jealousy?
[34:00]
Susana Carmona
That I totally understand you and that it's normal that you're jealous because it's wonderful to have a baby inside your belly. It's wonderful to see and feel the baby having hiccup and giving you like patadas, like kicks. It's amazing to deliver the baby. It's like extreme and can be very empowering process. And yeah, you should be jealous. You should be jealous.
[34:29]
Narrator
Scientifically speaking, you should be jealous is a pretty unusual answer. And to be fair, Susannah has taught me that one part of the story is pregnancy, but the other is caregiving. And that caregiving in men and women, in biological parents and adoptive parents, is also a pathway that can produce profound physiological change. But what she's also saying is that the experience of pregnancy and childbirth is unique. Physically, neurologically, hormonally, spiritually. Something is happening in the body and the brain that changes how A person experiences another human being. And for most of history, the we talked about it in mystical terms. But now, slowly, science is beginning to catch up.
[35:16]
Interviewer (possibly Mike)
You've been doing this for 20 years. Almost 20 years, yeah. So now, in new medical textbooks, are there heads on the pregnant bodies or not?
[35:26]
Susana Carmona
Well, certainly on my presentations and on the presentations of my students, there is a head in there. There is a head in there. I have to check. I haven't checked medical tests, but actually, when you search on the Internet, this information pops up. There's no longer, like, just changes at the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the musculoskeletal system. They also talk about brain changes, and they are in there. Even at Wikipedia. Or when you ask AI about physiological changes during pregnancy, the brain is in there, which is already a very important milestone. Right.
[36:03]
Narrator
For a long time, we studied pregnancy like the brain wasn't part of the story, as if becoming a parent was something that happened everywhere but in the mind. Meanwhile, neuroscientists were busy writing papers about taxi drivers in London because they knew where Baker street was. And look, spatial navigation is important. But what Susannah and her colleagues have shown is that pregnancy produces, neurologically speaking, the most profound changes we know of in adult life, a process that changes what we notice, what we remember, what we care about, and maybe even who we become. Mothers, it turns out, are not the only ones whose biology changes. Next time on Birth of a Parent, the anthropologist who discovered that caring for a baby changes men's hormones too, including his own.
[37:13]
Anthropologist Guest
We do know that the dads who are the most involved, spending the most time with their kids have meaningfully lower testosterone, about 20% lower than the dads who are reporting basically not spending any time doing hands on caregiving or helping to be kind of responsible for their children in that kind of caregiving way where they're directly engaging with them.
[37:37]
Narrator
If you'd like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.
[37:50]
Susana Carmona
This podcast is part of Early Childhood Matters, the storytelling platform published by the Van Leer Foundation.