Abstract
After giving birth, a mother’s brain undergoes functional adaptations fostering the ability to properly respond to the needs of her newborn. Tuning into and understanding her baby’s crying is among the top skills required and executed in the early stages of motherhood. However, surprisingly little is known about potential changes in the anatomy of the maternal auditory cortex. Therefore, in this longitudinal study, we compared the brains of 14 healthy women between immediate postpartum (within 1–2 days of childbirth) and late postpartum (at 4–6 weeks after childbirth), focusing on areas of the primary, secondary, and higher auditory cortex. We observed significant volume increases within all auditory regions and subregions examined, which might reflect rapid adaptations of the mother’s brain in relation to reliably interpreting her newborn’s cries. There was also a trend for a larger postpartum increase within right-hemispheric regions compared to left-hemispheric regions that might be specifically linked to the ability to discern the pitch, sound, and volume of a baby’s crying. Follow-up research is warranted to replicate these findings and evaluate their current interpretation.
Highlights
There were no significant decreases between immediate postpartum
With respect tofor possible hemispheric differences, there was a trend forFDR-corrected a significantly points all regions of interest
With respect to the location of the effect, our findings corroborate prior reports of gray matter increases in auditory areas, as detected when applying voxel-based morphometry (VBM), both in independent and overlapping samples [7,8]
Summary
Mothers’ brains show links to their baby’s cries on a functional level Scientific evidence for this natural phenomenon has been provided, for example, in neurophysiological experiments measuring brain activity in response to infant crying using functional magnetic resonance imaging or magnetoencephalography [1,2,3,4]. These studies have demonstrated that there is an early crying-specialized activity in a mother’s brain, and that the auditory cortex is among those regions that showed such an activity
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