A Mother's Brain

AS FEATURED IN THE BBC DOCUMENTARY BABY BRAIN: WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON? 85% of women experience pregnancy at some point in their lives. It is an experience enabling the very existence of our species. Yet the neuroscience of this first step in the process of nurturing the next generation has seen little serious, rigorous study—until now. Susana Carmona’s leading edge research for over a decade makes A Mother’s Brain a landmark in ending sexual bias in women’s health. Among her many ongoing initiatives, she is building a unique longitudinal database tracking how mothers’ brains change from preconception to several years after childbirth. Drawing on her studies of individual mothers, Carmona writes with empathy about the challenges of motherhood from the reshaping of a woman’s immune system and hormonal dynamics to the geography of her cortex and its plasticity. Her book reveals that pregnancy triggers rapid changes in the brain, guided by hormones, that seem to nurture maternal well-being and mother-baby bonding. Some cells with the baby’s genetic code cross into the mother, and that the code can reside in the mother’s brain for the rest of her life.