Katherine Ellison is right about one thing: something unique happens to your brain when you have a baby. You become an active protagonist in the emotional, manipulative and occasionally hysterical debate about the nature of modern motherhood. Variously: women are having too many children; too few children; too many boys; not enough boys. Working mothers raise cleverer children; thicker children; more anxious children. . . on and on the statisticians and scientists go, expounding theory after theory, some less bonkers than others, but all pretty much guaranteed to flip your stomach as you catch the headlines in between making breakfast, trying to find a clean pair of tights and bundling everyone into the back of the car for the school run.
Ellison, an award-winning journalist and mother of two, is the latest to add her voice to the cacophony. Being a journalist, and therefore more media-savvy than your average boffin, she also has a unique selling point: a counter-intuitive approach guaranteed to grab headlines. She argues that, far from diminishing a woman’s intellectual abilities, motherhood actually makes you cleverer.
Her book, The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter, combines many scientific studies with hefty amounts of entertaining anecdotal evidence to explain why this should be. In a nutshell, the logic is this: being a mother makes you more perceptive (always alert to potential danger); more efficient (you are forced to multi-task); more resilient (mothers never get sick); more driven (you have people depending on you); and more emotionally intelligent (you are no longer the centre of your own universe). All those factors, combined with a heady mixture of hormones “can literally reshape the brain, making it a more complex organ”.
It’s a neat theory. If you subscribe to the idea that the brain, rather like your pelvic floor, needs regular exercise to stay in shape, then the arrival of a new baby is sure to provide a vigorous mental work-out. There is no doubt that the first few months of a baby’s life are a vertiginous steep learning curve for any mother, from working out how to fix a car-seat to negotiating night-time feeds with your partner (assuming he hasn’t already moved back in with his mother). But does any of it really make women materially more clever — or just better at managing limited resources?
For example: I have two children, aged 1 and 2. I work full-time and I am, or at least was when I last checked, still on speaking terms with my husband. By Ellison’s criteria, I should be the proud owner of a newly expanded brain, a super-efficient organ which ought to propel me to new heights of success, both at home and in the workplace. Or perhaps not. It took me the best part of three weeks to read this book, in between an alarming reverse-potty training incident, a strange bug that gave everyone blisters on their tongue, a partial house move, a leaky boiler, a broken cooker hood (which I still haven’t got around to fixing), a bigger workload, a christening and my daughter’s first day at nursery — the most traumatic part of which was having to embroider her name on her smock. The time it took me to read it is no reflection on the book. It was just that I kept having to re-read bits that I’d forgotten; also, at one point the book disappeared for a whole week. It eventually turned up at the bottom of the laundry basket.
Admittedly, despite my best efforts to persuade the children to sleep through the night, I am fairly sleep deprived, which Ellison says can cause huge problems, “mommy” brain or no. But I also breastfed both my children which, according to Ellison, should have boosted levels of the hormone oxytocin, thus permanently reducing my reactivity to stress.
Unfortunately, not only did I find breastfeeding intensely stressful in itself (Ellison briefly acknowledges that some women feel this way, but goes on to say that “once they master it, the experience becomes as enriching for the mind as meditation”, which is just about the most annoying thing I’ve ever read on the subject), I am definitely more, not less, strung out now than before.
Maybe I’m the exception that proves the rule. Certainly, I’d be loath to start an argument with a woman who, while her two children were still tiny, “had finished my book, gone on a speaking tour, launched a freelance career, helped my kids adjust to a new community, supervised repairs to our home, found a great circle of friends, and tracked down a qualified expert to help a babysitter affected with early stage leprosy.”
Early stage leprosy, hey — perhaps she could help with the weird tongue-blistering disease. Seriously, though, one might be tempted to say that Ellison is, and hangs out with, born over-achievers: women of above average capability and intelligence who have simply applied their considerable skills to being good mothers.
It is certainly true that many of the case histories she uses to illustrate practical aspects of her theory are not what you might call ordinary. There’s the woman who, still breastfeeding twin girls while working as “regional chief of internal medicine at Colorado Permanente [a medical group]”, maximises time by hooking up to her hands-free electric breastpump(!) while driving to work. Or the senior executive at Pfizer who, not content with premature triplets, went on to have a fourth child while studying for an MBA in the evenings.
Hubris aside, this book nevertheless makes for a fascinating read. The science, while mostly inconclusive and often controversial, is intriguing, and Ellison is an engaging writer, weaving encounters with lab rats and researchers into an anecdotal and readable commentary — a very female, right-brain approach to the subject. It’s like the best kind of dinner-party conversation: bit shaky on fact; great talking point. She has a witty turn of phrase (for example: “ necessity is the mother of multitasking”) and much of what she writes rings true in an emotionally intelligent sort of way.
Regardless of the theory about babies boosting brain power, this is a book packed with identifiable truths about the reality of being a wife and mother. In particular Ellison is very useful when it comes to explaining the gulf between men and women’s attitudes towards child rearing, a universal cause of friction for sleep-deprived couples. As the woman’s brain becomes more flexible and agile in response to ever-changing demands, the man’s by comparison appears more inflexible.
There are physiological reasons for this, to do with the different wiring of the male and female brain — but Ellison certainly strikes a chord when she quotes Helen Fisher, an anthropologist, who says: “Women gather more data from their environment and construct more intricate relationships between the information. By contrast, men tend to compartmentalise — to get rid of ancillary data and focus only on what they regard as important.”
All of which goes a long way to explain the mystery of why it is that men are perfectly capable of conducting long conversations on the telephone, or digesting entire review sections of Sunday newspapers without in any way noticing (or apparently minding) that the children are re-enacting their own small-scale version of the Wicker Man in the sitting room. And that, as far as I’m concerned, has to be proof that she is on to something.
The Mommy Brain by Katherine Ellison is published by Basic Books at £8.99
Mothers are brainier: what the research says
EFFICIENCY
Men really do have bigger brains than women — the female brain is an average of 15 per cent smaller than the male brain. However, the female brain contains more neurons, which may mean that it is more efficient. Pregnancy and motherhood seem to enhance this. Rats and monkeys that have had babies do better at tasks involving learning and memory than their childless peers. The combination of changes in the brain prompted by increased hormone levels and the stimulating presence of offspring is thought to be responsible.
ADDED VALUE AT WORK
Ellison suggests that motherhood increases employability in four key areas: ability to co-ordinate under pressure, dependability, leadership skills and caregiving. Working mothers are more dependable — partly, but not only, because they need to support their families. Motherhood promotes skills such as team building, mentoring and conflict resolution which are invaluable at work.
DRIVE
It’s often assumed that women who have children focus all their energy on the wellbeing of their own families. The neurologist Paul MacLean argued that, in fact, the way maternal behaviour in humans has evolved means that women generalise their concern for their own children into concern for the welfare of other members of the species. His theory is that maternal behaviour in humans doesn’t just involve the limbic system — the part of the brain we have in common with other mammals that deals with emotion — but also the prefrontal cortex, the “social” part of the brain that deals with functions like impulse control and complex social interaction. Though MacLean’s theory is not universally accepted, Ellison points out that there is plenty of evidence that women’s concern about their own children leads them to try to change the world for the better.
MOTIVATION
The need to look after their children makes women more focused and resourceful, more aggressive, and less susceptible to fear. To test the theory that motherhood makes rats less fearful, researchers in Virginia placed virgin rats, pregnant rats and nursing rats in the middle of a circular enclosure. Rats generally prefer to stay out of open spaces, and the virgin rats headed for cover after about five seconds. Pregnant rats stayed slightly longer, but the nursing rats the longest. The hormones prolactin and oxytocin, both of which increase during pregnancy and nursing in humans, are thought to play a key role in reducing stress, anxiety and fear.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
As they learn to interpret and meet the needs of their babies, mothers develop skills that help them relate to others. According to Marco Iacoboni, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, when parents imitate their children’s expressions they may be strengthening their capacity for empathy with other people. He suspects that practice in imitating and being imitated strengthens the neural circuits that affect our ability to empathise, reinforcing the capacity to understand the feelings of other people as well as those of their child. Parents become experts at decoding non-verbal communication, on which an estimated 90 per cent of all human communication is based. A Harvard study in the 1970s found that mothers of “pre-linguistic toddlers” were better than childless women at identifying what emotion someone was expressing from a soundless video clip.
PERCEPTION
There is a sound evolutionary reason why acute senses are important for new mothers. Improved sensory perception may play an important role in protecting and bonding with a child. In mice, pregnancy triggers a burst of neuron growth affecting the area of the brain responsible for interpreting smells. Prolactin is thought to be responsible. Visual perception also improves in pregnant women. New experiences lead the brain to reorganise itself — connections strengthen with repeated use.
This is known as brain plasticity, and as new mothers are bombarded with unfamiliar and intense experiences, it is likely that their brains undergo a period of intense reorganisation.
ELLA STIMSON
Based on research summaried in The Mommy Brain
