"Three years of stupid pregnancy"
If my slow reaction after giving birth to the first child is the first time I have to stop trying it, then after giving birth to the second child twins , my perception deteriorates, memory decline, and logical confusion may be a heavy blow from "Three years of stupid pregnancy" to me.
"Three years of stupidity in one pregnancy" - many people's explanation for this phenomenon is that they have severe lack of sleep.
At the beginning, I thought so. When I was in my first child, the child was an angel baby. I ate and slept. Didn’t I not have been stupid for long or too stupid?
has reached the second child, and the daily "fragmented" sleep is less than 5 hours. I became slow to react, my memory lost, and my hair fell out in large orders...
and lasted for two long years. It was not until the child was weaned when he was two months old and started to sleep for a whole day that I was able to recover slowly.
is correct, because many previous studies have confirmed this statement.
Most of the burden of taking care of babies falls on the mother. Generally speaking, it is a blessing to feel that it is not sleepy or tired after getting up in 7 days a week.
lacks enough sleep for many consecutive days. Not to mention the reaction speed and memory ability, even the resistance will decrease a lot.
These are of course one of the reasons why new mothers are stupid for three years after pregnancy, but not the entire reason.
Because novice mothers are in a stable physical condition before the child is born, in addition to having a stomach out and having difficulty moving, and when their diet and sleep are stable, there is still a pregnancy silly phenomenon, which cannot be explained by the serious lack of sleep.
So, there are likely to be other physiological changes.
Scientists' discovery
"Three years of stupidity in one pregnancy" is a life proverb summarized by generations. Many times, people just treat it as a joke, or use it as a shield for new mothers to make stupid.
However, in a study by British scientists, it was found that
At that time, these scientists studied the impact of preeclampsia on the brain of pregnant women.
They noticed that all the 9 healthy pregnant women and 5 preeclampsia who participated in the experiment had obvious brain volume declines, with the worst people falling by 6%, and the mildest people also falling by 2%, with an average of 4%.
This decline starts from the first week of pregnancy, drops evenly all the way to 1 month after the baby is born, and then slowly recovers, with a recovery period of up to 2 years. ——Nature-Neuroscience
Later, in the sub-publication of "Nature-Neuroscience" of the journal "Neuroscience" of the magazine "Neuroscience" conducted a more detailed study on this phenomenon.
The subjects of this study included 45 women of childbearing age who performed regular brain functional MRI scans. Later, 20 of them became pregnant, so they continued to compare for more than 2 years.
results show that:
Pregnant women start from pregnancy, and the brain in the anterior and midline, posterior midline, bilateral lateral prefrontal cortex, and bilateral temporal cortex, gray matter continues to decrease, and the trough is one month after the child is born.
Except for the , which is responsible for memory, the hippocampus recovers slightly faster, it takes an average of 2 to 3 years for the restoration of the other parts to completely recover to the unpregnant level.
will do several cognitive test questions when the subjects participate in functional MRI scans before, during pregnancy and after childbirth. During the word list test, the researchers also observed the trend of their scores falling first and then rising.
These changes are exactly the same as one pregnant for three years.
Therefore, in addition to insufficient rest time, the influence of various hormones, the reduction of gray matter may be one of the reasons, and may even be an important reason.
It is not only the mother who is stupid in pregnancy, but also the father who is stupid in pregnancy
All the research on "pregnancy stupid in pregnancy" has been focused on novice mothers. In September 2022, a study on novice fathers during pregnancy found that in fact, it is not only the mother who reduces the brain size, but also the father. It is the same as it is, but the degree is lighter, with an average reduction of about 1%, and the reduction is also gray matter.
If mothers get pregnant because of physiological factors, the body's gray matter begins to decrease from the moment they conceive, this makes sense. But the father did not get pregnant and have a baby directly. Why did such a change occur?
Perhaps, we can first understand why gray matter decreases.
Gray matter is mainly where neuronal cell bodies gather, while white matter is where neuronal synapses gather.
gray matter has a wide range of functions.
When ordinary people hear the reduction of gray matter, they always think it is a bad thing. Isn’t this the brain atrophy of ? ? Although it can recover later, at least the shrinking period is not very wonderful.
In fact, each of us will go through a process of neuronal pruning for more than ten years from childhood to youth.
When a person is 2-5 years old, the number of neurons and the number of peripheral neurons reach a peak, and then a long pruning process.
Although the total number of neurons does not change significantly, the pruning process occurs locally. Neurons that grew up at the age of 3 but have not used much and the synapse associated with it will slowly atrophy and disappear;
and those frequently used functions will become more and more thick and thicker. ——"Nature-Neuroscience"
For most people, for more than a decade, the brain has been continuously stimulating through daily activities and learning, and the brain trims and grows the connection between neurons and neurons based on these stimuli.
The reduction in brain size of novice parents is also similar to this process.
After testing, scientists found that a behavior corresponds to the area where gray matter is reduced, which is called "pup disgust".
This behavior can be observed not only in humans, but also in experimental animals.
Some new mothers will discard their puppies when they scream and cry.
When a human baby is just born, objectively speaking, it is not very good-looking. The body stained with blood and mucus, the wrinkled skin, and the constant crying will all cause people's anxiety and disgust.
But this is mainly to arouse disgust from others, and most of the parents of newborns do not.
In addition to the large amount of secretion of oxytocin , they feel distressed when they see babies, it is also related to the reduction of gray matter starting from pregnancy to shaping brain emotions.
Scientists found in the test that the degree of change in gray matter volume can significantly predict the quality of maternal and infant attachment and the hostility of postpartum mothers to the newborn. After the volume of
is reduced to a certain value, the mother will not be hostile to the baby's various behaviors.
In other words, although pregnant silly looks like a papaya, the larger the difference in intelligence performance between the child before and after birth, the more likely her child is to be cared for. The situation of the father is similar.
The shrinking gray matter area of the novice father is concentrated on 2 of the 8 main functions of gray matter, one is the default mode network and the other is vision.
, and the default mode network, the typical functions are emotional processing, self-awareness generation, environmental monitoring and introspection.
Scientists speculate that this change in brain function will strengthen the communication mode between the novice father and the baby and strengthen the psychological connection between him and the baby.
But these changes come at a price, that is, pregnancy is stupid, which is especially obvious for new mothers.
But the good news is that the price is not in vain.
In addition to reaping the joy and hardship of children's growth, there is another more affordable one. In that more than 3 years of study, it was found that after an average of 2.3 years of pregnancy silly recovered, mothers who had given birth were generally higher in memory tests than before giving birth, and also higher than another group of unborn women in the group. ——"Nature-Neuroscience"
In other words, although it is stupid for three years in pregnancy, when the child just grows up, the mother's brain will be more useful than not being pregnant.
To sum up, in order to enable parents to treat their children with love, our brains have evolved structurally. Nature screened out these genes that will become stupid during pregnancy to allow them to take better care of their children.
Conclusion: Science may prove the result of natural selection
Yes, three years of hard work to take care of children have passed, and my life has gradually returned to normal. Contrary to many mothers who feel that having children will drag down women, I enjoyed this time of parenting.
At the same time, when I recovered, I invested in a new ocean of knowledge and began to explore new areas of knowledge. I don’t feel that I am worse than before I had a child.
On the contrary, the experience of raising children has given me a newer and deeper understanding of life and life.
I believe many people will have a question about this research like me. Why do dads also change?
In fact, not all dads are lucky enough to get such changes. Only those dads who are in the dad state during pregnancy to breastfeeding period will have obvious changes.
After parents get pregnant, their brain gray matter decreased, and their corresponding cognitive levels have been reduced. This should also be an evolutionary mechanism that is more conducive to human reproduction.
It is true that human pups are more energy-consuming and collapsed. So how to reduce this collapse and better raise offspring can only rely on changes in brain structure from an evolutionary perspective. Interesting scientific research like
actually gives us two tips:
First, companies should hire more mothers who have given birth to children. They have become smarter than before, and have experienced the most difficult job in the world - raising children, and they will not be afraid of any storms in the future. Moms can also be freed from the anxiety of being separated from society after giving birth.
Second, fathers should participate more in parenting, not to become stupid, but to cooperate with families to raise children is a better choice.
OK, that’s all for today’s sharing. I am a psychological counselor and a family education instructor grapefruit mother. I share the parenting experience of three children and are not alone on the way to take care of my children. Leave a message in the comment section of
. Do you think you have become stupid after you have children?
