In a café in the centre of Madrid, María (not her real name) can’t find the word she wants to use to describe the kind of life an acquaintance she’s talking to her husband about leads. She’s used it hundreds of times, but now she can’t remember it. “It’s kind of simple, but it’s not the word I’m looking for. It’s not simple either,” she tells her partner, who assures her that he understands what she’s talking about and that she doesn’t need to keep thinking about it. But María is frustrated. She doesn’t understand why that word doesn’t come to mind and wonders what’s wrong with her. For months now she’s felt like her head isn’t going as it used to, that she’s not herself, that a feeling of mental fog invades her most of the day.
María, a 33-year-old from Madrid, has a five-month-old baby. By now she thinks she should have gotten over the postpartum period and, after that, gotten her old life back. What she hasn’t accepted is that this will never happen. With her son, a new María was born who, although she now feels she barely has any memory, has gained many things. “By becoming mothers, we acquire the ability to learn quickly and we become more empathetic and altruistic. Our social cognition also increases and we cope better with life’s difficulties. And all this cleverness stays with us forever,” explains perinatal psychologist Diana Crego Cordón.
In his book Neuromaternal (Ediciones B, 2024), psychologist and neuroscientist Susana Carmona reveals that 80% of mothers report memory and concentration problems. This is because pregnancy prepares the woman’s brain to face the challenges that motherhood brings. And it does so by modifying the anatomy of the brain so that it can respond as a priority to the needs of the baby that is about to be born. “The brain regions that support the reflexive representation of the self, empathy, altruism and social cognition change profoundly with pregnancy,” says Carmona. “Pregnancy hormones are capable of modifying the galinin neurons of the human hypothalamus so that they respond selectively and persistently to the baby’s stimuli.” As Carmona points out in her book, motherhood is a characteristic that interacts with the rest of the spheres that make up our self and redefines us in each of them.
In February 2017, the magazine Nature Neuroscience published the study —Pregnancy causes lasting changes in the structure of the human brain— which was carried out by Susana Carmona, Elseline Hoekzema and Erika Barba over a decade. The first research focused on studying the changes that a woman’s brain undergoes when she becomes a mother. Even though all mothers knew that something was going on in their heads, in 2017 nothing had been investigated about it. In the study, which the magazine Science Among the most important scientific discoveries of that year, the three researchers discovered that pregnancy and motherhood leave an indelible mark on the brain of women. But this, as we have already mentioned, is not necessarily bad. They also discovered that the changes that occur during motherhood are similar to those that occur during adolescence, since in both cases we go through stages of great maturity and growth. This is where the term coined in the sixties by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael comes from: matrescence.
“Gestational age is a metabolically demanding process because you have to learn a lot of things in record time,” says Carmona. She adds: “Mothers learn to train their executive functions and this gives us improvements at a psychosocial level. We regulate and control emotions better and our ability to empathise improves.” The neuroscientist says that a database that has compared 12,000 mothers with non-mothers shows that the brains of the former remain younger in the long term and that the immune and hormonal systems remain better. “Lifestyle has a lot to do with it. The life that a mother leads is usually healthier, she takes better care of her diet, she goes on more trips into nature with her children…” she points out.
Diana Crego admits that, like María, “it is very frustrating to see that the postpartum period passes early and that we are still not the same as before.” Sleep deprivation, mental strain, lack of support networks and the state of physical and mental health influence it because “our brain has a limit” and focuses on the priority: the baby. “That is why mothers, even if they feel like Dori, [el pez sin memoria de la película Buscando a Nemo]they are experts in everything related to caring for their baby. The brain no longer works the same, but it focuses on what is most important and is infallible in that regard,” says the perinatal psychologist.
As Carmona points out in Neuromaternalit’s time to redefine the term momnesia (which emphasizes the supposed deficits that mothers suffer simply by virtue of being mothers) and rebrand it as matrescence, a name that better encompasses the good and the not-so-good of motherhood without focusing solely on cognitive deficiencies.
Yes, it is true that attention becomes selective and that mental resources are reorganized to include new areas that monitor the long list of tasks related to caring for the baby. That is why it took Maria three hours to remember that the word she was looking for in the cafeteria was austere, and yet she is able to change a diaper in less than a minute while her son is squirming. In addition, this mother knows by heart the day and time of the child’s six-month check-up and the deadline to apply for the Madrid Community grant for nursery school. No, she has not forgotten it. scatterbrain. What Maria has, as they said Someecards cards (and remember Carmona in Neuromaternal), is a brain that works like a browser with 2,897 tabs open all the time.
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