Welcome to The Kick, your expert led podcast helping you explore and learn everything about getting pregnancy, birth, and becoming a parent.

On the podcast and our online pregnancy program grow My Baby, we share my experience of helping more than four thousand babies.

To be born, and our experience of running a women's health clinic and parenting for boys.

We're here to help everyone to feel empowered in pregnancy and birth with real life, practical information.

Welcome everyone, n I'm Bridget Maloney and guess what.

This is our last episode for the year of the Kick.

We're going to take a little break over Christmas and be back sort of midway through January.

Today we've got doctor Sarah mackay.

She's an Australian based neuroscientist and science communicator who specializes in translating brain research into practical strategies to improve health, wellbeing and performance, particularly interested in the female brain, and she's written a couple of books, and one of the books that we're going to talk to her about is her book The Baby Brain.

Welcome Sarah, thanks so much for joining us.

Oh, thanks for invitation.

Obviously you're here to talk to us about baby brain and now as a society, at best we kind of joke about it, but at worse, sometimes it's said to be something that can dismiss a woman or maybe get them overlooked for a work promotion, or if the woman has internalized this so called baby brain, it actually might make them feel stupid.

So, as a neuroscientist, what motivated you to study a woman's brain in pregnancy and postpartum?

That is a good question because I spent about twenty years, as you know, going through all my neuroscience training and working in medical research and then and science communications, not really thinking about the female brain and women's reproductive health and women's brain health across the lifespan at all.

It was only in twenty fifteen, so ten years ago now, when I was writing for the ABC kind of a brain blog they had back then, and I wrote a couple of articles and one of them was on menopause and brain fog, which went gangbusters.

And as a kind of a consequence of that, about a year later, I was invited to write a book.

And I didn't really want to write about menopause because there was no research really and it just seemed very I was forty at the time, it was like, and I'm glad I didn't write that book because it wouldn't have been much to write, to be perfly honest, especially with the neuroscience.

And interestingly, the publisher at the time said to me, well, what about baby brain?

And I dismissed that out right.

I was like, that's not a thing.

But I'd also never heard about it being a thing when I'd gone through my pregnant season, early years of raising my kids.

My boys are now nearly sixteen and nearly eighteen, so I'm kind of, you know, that the end of teenage parenting.

But that really kind.

Of got me thinking about, Hey, there's lots of different aspects of women's health and our reproductive life spans that we consider through the lens of neuroscience, and so wrote decided I would write it kind of looking from worm to tomb, so to speak, looking at each different stage of the female lifespan, and look at what kind of neuroscience was being done, look at anxiety and depression, and puberty and pregnancy and menopause, all of the things.

When I was in the middle or kind of the early stage of writing that book, it was the end of twenty sixteen, early twenty seventeen, a paper was published that was the first real pape that had ever come out of brain imaging and looking at women's brain structure and function across the course of their first pregnancy.

One for me was one of the more exciting papers I'd ever read on this topic.

Two, I think it kind of blew open this entire field of women's brain health research, maternal brain research that had never really been maybe had been thought about or talked about, like you say, colloquially, this idea of baby brain, but it had never really been carefully interrogated as a kind of a neuroscience discipline.

So one that kind of started off this new discipline.

So I was writing about this paper and the book, and then of course I had to come back to interrogate this concept of baby brain, which, as I say, for me personally was interesting because one I never experienced it, but two I'd never heard about it, and I kind of couldn't let go of that.

Knowing what I know about neuroscience that a lot of the experiences we have, whether they be thoughts or feelings or behaviors, also encompass expectations and what we've been told we should be experiencing.

I kind of couldn't let go of that idea.

The book is even called baby Brain because neuroscience.

So this is my first book.

The second book I wrote was called baby Brain, where I really wanted to interrogate the entire experience of pregnancy motherhood, but I kind of had to wait a few years until my boys were a bit older, and I was writing from as they say, a scar not a wound.

And this idea of baby brain is four out.

Of five women will put their hands up, either during pregnancy or in the early stages of motherhood and say, yes, I have this thing that we would call baby brain.

Now, as a scientist, being pregnant and being a mum a two very different neurological and psychological and physiological events, so we really do need to consider them separately.

But it is interesting that we would use the same language to describe the experience in both.

I mean, ideally, what we do as we bring women into the research lab and we do a whole host or as we call it, a battery of cognitive testing on women.

If you say you're feeling and forgetful and you can't pay attention, well let's test you and see you know what's going on.

There's a subjective description, what is the objective measures picking up?

And then the careful studies that are done.

And ideally we want a longitudinal study.

And there's lots of different ways we can study women and do good science.

We can do randomized control trials, we can do case control where we look at someone with an experience and someone.

Without and compare them.

Ideally, we do a longitudinal study where we've got a big cohort of women and we kind of follow them through the life or follow them through pregnancy in motherhood and test cognition at various points in time.

And when the longitudinal studies are done, we don't pick up any objective changes in cognition either during pregnancy or in the early stages of motherhood.

And that's a real paradox, or it's a conundrum because there is a neuroscientist and a research agung, but we're not picking anything up and the women are going, well, we're experiencing something.

Luckily, you know, we haven't dismissed these experiences outright researchers, and there are some neuroscience researchers that have kind of gone to tease out that paradox and that conundrum like what is going on?

Why do women say they feel us but we're not picking it up?

And I suppose we can sum up, particularly if we look in the early stages of motherhood, we can kind of sum the investigations up by saying, it's not your brain that is letting you down.

There are a lot of competing demands on your brain, this ecosystem that your brain is trying to function, and particularly once your baby is kind of out and you know it it's in your arms, and what happens during pregnancy, which we can talk about, your brain has been reorganized and rewired to focus almost solely on your baby.

All of your attentional resources are focused on keeping your baby alive and reacting and responding appropriately, feeding your baby, listening to your baby, thinking about your baby, Like your mind and your brain are consumed with your baby, which is kind of almost what mother nature intended, Like the evolutionary mandate is that we keep our offspring healthy and alive.

All mammalian mothers do.

This's not just human mothers.

And memory and how well our brain functions to be ends very largely on attention.

What information we take in and what information we filter out, and if our intention is consumed by the baby, we're not going to be paying attention filtering in or out superfluous information that isn't going to benefit us in the baby that diet, we're not going to remember to buy husband's bananas, or where you know someone else's shoes are, or the email or the shopping list, or you know someone's name that we haven't thought about in a while.

Yet.

Women have been primed since puberty almost that once you've got a female brain, you add in some hormones, it equals dysfunction and decline, and when it's being challenged as it is, and you've got these intentional resources directed to the baby.

If you forget something, then we've been taught, oh, there's a single baby brain, so it's a neurological deficit.

So you go, oh, me and my ditsy, dumb, little mum brain, I'm forgetting things, and we almost kind of internalize this idea.

There's so much research which is kind of coming in and looking at this conundrum and finding that the greater the cognitive load women have on them.

We've all heard about the cognitive load and the emotional labor of otherhood and parenting.

I mean, that's you know, that's that's part of it.

It's not women letting them down.

It's the ecosystem that women are trying to parent in.

And because we've internalized this idea that something's wrong with our brains, no one's kind of looking for another solution.

Women are going on.

It's just me and my baby brain.

It's not a neurological issue.

It's a ecosystem social support issue, whereby we need to support women to focus on the baby and pack up the slack for all of the other things that are going on.

And you know, a family or a you know, in a little ecosystem of the mother you're granting.

Yeah, that's kind of where the research is heading.

Now.

There's there's some other components to what we can discuss where we see cognitive upsides and benefits and exactly what does go on when we're looking at women's brains.

And I often think, I mean, I don't know whether this is still part of the lexicon.

It certainly was when my boys were younger.

It's like, you know, give it to the you know, there's the super mum, she can do everything.

You know, give it to the busy person, and mums will take on these kind of extra roles as well, and then if she drops the ball, it doesn't matter because you'll just blame her brain.

So no one else needs to really kind of get involved and help out.

The better outcomes that we see for women, not just in those subjective experiences of baby brain, but mental health outcomes just over a well being.

Are women who are well socially supported, who have got like the cavalry has comeing to kind of help and facilitate and mother her while she's mother and the baby.

And those are the women that we know have better outcomes all around.

And those are also the women who are less likely perceive trying to function as a neurological deficit, because it's not a neurological deficit.

So what I'm hearing is that this cognitive depth that's some women might feel.

And I'm going to put my hand up here and say I did have some baby brain.

And I remember one time distinctly because in my first pregnancy.

I was say thirty four weeks.

And I had to give a speech to about thirty people, and I lost my words.

I was standing up on stage, and I can remember like if you're talking about cognitive overload, you know.

Maybe it was that I had to drive there to begin with.

It was an hour out of Melbourne.

I wore like stupid shoes which were really really uncomfortable, so I was physically uncomfortable.

And I'm standing there and I had been thrown in at the last minute to do this speech, so it wasn't I didn't feel one hundred percent prepared.

So I'm standing there, lost my words, felt like a complete idiot.

And then I think, you know, someone stood up and goes, you know, give Bridget a chair.

She's obviously very pregnant and needs to sit down type of thing.

So you know, I have experienced that, and I have also.

So but and you have gone it was baby brain instead of all of these other things that were potentially happening.

And this is what women do.

We default back to Neurologically, i'men paired because of this baby in my tummy, and what happens during pregnancy is different than what happens during motherhood.

But also when you've got a baby in you, particularly the latest stages of pregnancy, and it's moving.

Around, you're very aware of your body.

And if we look at things like say working memory, or the ability to quickly recall.

The less distractions you have, even if they are subconscious distractions, well, the more distractions you have, let's say, even if they are subconscious distractions you're not consciously thinking, oh about the baby, your working.

Memory goes down.

And that's the ability to kind of manipulate things in your mind's eye and quick sharp recall and kind of on the spot problem solving.

So you know, you had sore feet, you were pregnant, you were thrown into something.

You know that it could have been a young guy in his twenties thrown into that sort of situation, and maybe he would have lost his words for a moment there, but he's not automatically going to default to blaming his brain because he hasn't been primed throughout his lifespan.

That as soon as we've got hormones and a brain and we're a woman and there throwing a baby as well to the max, there's data out there looking also, and I kind of often think we carry our mobile phones around these days like little babies in our arms, and they are another constant source of distraction.

Perhaps also, I mean, no one had when I had my babies, like there was no mobile phones.

I think I think I had.

It was like one of those old Nokia ones, thank goodness.

The old clam one, which is good too.

Yeah, because it's that double You've got that double kind of distraction there of the baby and the phone.

But even if you haven't got a baby in your arms, you've got a phone in your hand.

And there's research also showing that if you've got your mobile phone in the room with you, face up and on, your working memory will go down when you're doing cognitive testing.

So you've got to kind of turn it off and put it in another room because that constant like micro distraction or micro attentional drawer away to the phone or to the baby and your tummy reduces your working memory.

So there's more cognitive load, so you're trying to do more processing.

But as soon as you're add in some kind of reproductive kind of transition, women just to fault back to blaming that for dysfunction instead of thinking, well, my brain's just trying to work on an ecosystem.

My brain is doing fine.

Part of it is this story.

There was some research came out or at least a kind of a narrative review of the research earlier this year by a couple of health psychologists who were looking at how this cultural narrative that women have absorbed has driven the research agenda, such that women are going, I have baby brain.

Is something wrong with my brain?

And so the scientists keep going in and trying to look for it and trying to look for it and trying to look for it.

And it's only been in recent years that we've had other researchers going on, going, hey, why don't we look at how the brain changes?

Why don't we look at what some of the strengths and the adaptive benefits are, What are the evolutionary demands?

What are some ecology relevant ways in which we can test women's brains to see what the improvements and the enhancements might be versus constantly looking for a deficit that may simply be a cultural story.

And once we've started looking at the brain and looking at neuroscience and opening our minds to what we can study and find, we're finding a lot of upsides and benefits and strengths.

And that's why I called my second book, How Pregnancy in Motherhood Sculpt our brains and change our minds for the better, because if we start telling more positive stories, women will have different experiences and that's going to change absolutely, Like if you change the story, you're going to change the experience.

Instead of going, oh, well, there's just something wrong with my brain like you did when you gave that talk, you could go, actually, I am tired.

You threw me in at the last minute.

I'm perfectly capable.

There's just a lot going on.

It's not the pregnancy change your kind of resource.

Well no, I mean you could have said no.

And this fine, just I could have said nause it was not in my wheelhouse.

Yeah, So I want to talk a little bit about the cultural social side, and then I want to talk about the physiological So you know, back in the day, women wouldn't have been in the workplace at thirty four weeks pregnant to begin with, and in the nineteen fifties or earlier, they were actually asked to leave work as soon as they had their baby.

So, you know, we have gone from this point of not accepting women in the workforce to yes, women have the right to be in this workforce, but we still haven't set the structures up to support them in those workforces.

Have you got any thoughts on how we could better support women who are very pregnant in the workforce and postpartum mums.

I mean, I guess the I I mean women have always worked and mothers have always worked, and I suppose that's kind of put in quite a narrow Western perspective of what work is, which is that old idea that you meant to work as if you haven't got children, parents, you haven't got a job.

So there's there's that come to work and as if nothing else is going on in your life and bring your whole.

Whole sell all that kind of silly language, which I don't like.

I mean, women and lots of parts of the world and lots of age, you know, ages have have worked with their children next to them and with them and have carried on working through motherhood.

So I think it's perhaps the expectations we have of women to be working as if nothing else is going on, and the idea then that it's particularly in early motherhood because we haven't really talked about what's going on in pregnancy yet, which we will, but an early motherhood to carry on working as if you haven't got a child, And of course you're kind of your mind is going.

To be is going to be distracted.

So I think, I mean, I haven't thought too much about how to support mums going back to the workplace because I kind of feel like a lot of well, and I suppose I've thought about it in terms of especially here in Australia, it feels like it's an Excel spreadsheet decision about whether women go back to work or not and what you can afford, and it's kind of financial decision making, not thinking about mums and babies and families as these neurological, biological, psychological ecosystems where everyone is kind of interacting and into playing and how can we support the child and child development alongside women and having agency and having choice.

It feels very much like it's spreadsheet economics and financial decision making, and I'm not and I kind of feel like we need a little bit more of the kind of the child and the mum and the family and better than that decision making.

That's kind of what I thought later, Yeah, in terms of during I mean, and it's very hard for me to tease out my owners experiences from that, because of course I'm just focusing on what happens in the brain.

I'm not looking at politics.

That's not my jam me personally.

When I had my and I was an academic neuroscientist.

I was working, you know, doing health and science communications kind of after I left academia, and then when I was pregnant with my first son, I just didn't want to do all of the things.

And luckily I was financially able enough.

My husband and my sort of financial situation with his job was such that we didn't need me to be carrying on working financially.

That said, we had no family support.

We had no family here in Sydney where we had my oldest son.

My family was in New Zealand his family was in Ireland.

And I kind of thought, I don't want.

To do it all.

I don't want to be picking up and dropping off and checking in and logging out and doing and trying to do all of the things.

I want my boy well I didn't know they were going to be boys at that point, but I want my children and to have the childhood that I had, which was slow and relaxed and easy and wasn't rushed.

And I was quite determined to give them that.

So I had this kind of idealistic idea of what I wanted family life to be like.

But then I was financially able to do that, and I kind of thought, you know, and my mum's you know, one for sayings, and you know that the idea that you know, you're juggling all of these balls and some of them will bounce if you drop, and some of them are glass and they will shatter.

And I kind of thought, we haven't got family support around.

I know how I function best, and I thought, well, the career thing can go on hold, right, got a long life in front of me.

I've done pretty well so far in my career.

So I just said, oh, that's a bouncy ball.

I'll just let that bounce around, you know, kind of in the background for a while.

So I consciously made that choice because I wanted to protect my mental health, my marriage, and I had an idea of how I wanted to raise my kids.

I know not everyone has those choices, so it's hard for me to tease and bearing in mind also, I never had that narrative of baby brow.

I'd never grown up in a family or in a community that was constantly talking about sex and gender and girls doing this or not doing that, or capabilities or there was never conversations about PMS.

There was no conversations about baby brain.

Maybe I was also kind of very immersed in the world of science, health and medicine, so it was just quite pragmatic and my approach, and that's very much colored how I think about motherhood.

It's hard because of course there's a million different experiences, but that was how I chose to do things.

And then I picked that bouncing That bill bounced around for years and then I kind of picked it up and started playing around with it.

And I still let that ball drop.

You know, this year my oldest son was doing HSC and he's about to go off backpacking in Asia.

He's going tomorrow.

And my other sons you know, ye ten and you know, it's a socially complex time.

So I'm like that ball can just bounce about like over.

I like, I do not need to worry about that.

My priority is still my family.

You're still parenting when you've got teenage sons, you know, and it's so demanding and draining.

But in different ways, we've got the site.

We're matrescence now, right.

We didn't have that when I started, and for me, that's my priority.

That said, financially, you know, I'm with stable enough that I've been able to make that choice.

Yeah, I've we see it a lot in our clinic.

You know, people are choosing to have their babies later, you know they might be starting.

Our average age at the clinic is thirty two years old.

And then I were making those Yeah.

Oh well I was forty when I had my fourth term, so I feel like I've been parenting for a very very long time.

But yeah, I love that analogy of the bouncing balls that bounce back up again.

Yeah.

And if anywhere out there that I credit my mother.

Yeah, yeah, I love it because we do think get a ball will hit and shatter.

Yeah yeah, yeah.

And I and I was becoming a mother when Quentin Bryce was there going you can have it all but not all at.

The same time, and I took that on board.

But you know, I didn't have so we didn't have social media then we didn't have It makes me sound so old, but the messaging, the messages that I chose to listen to and inform my parenting, and I didn't care what anyone else was doing it just I didn't have they was just like my mum, quent and Bryce did that thing, and I thought, oh, well that makes sense, so I will just make that choice.

I want my kids to have a pretty chill top.

And they did.

And it was so hard.

It was still incredibly hard, and so often I would get to like three or four in the afternoon and just throw myself in the bed and cry, thinking I've still got two more hours until they can go to bed, you know, because I always made them go to bed early, they were.

In bed by early.

Seven people.

Seven pms was a late night.

I would start dinner, dinner, dinner, bath, dinners.

Would you know, we'd give him are at four thirty.

Teenage boys also need dinner at four thirty.

We've kind of gone back to that and again at ten pm.

And let's not to say it wasn't it wasn't hard.

It was incredibly hard.

But I tried to remove as many stressors as possible, and you know, and that was like pre work from you know, pre COVID.

You know.

Now my husband's always home is upstairs at the moment, thank goodness, he has been for the teenage years.

But it was incredibly difficult when they were little.

But I was also quite aware and I had, you know, saw a therapist to try and help me manage some of like the kind of the anger and the resentment and the end.

And I was like, my kids are easy.

I'm not.

I'm just this is so hard and you know, and a great psychotherapist help me kind of work through a lot of those that the processes of what I thought motherhood would be and feel like.

Because I say, we didn't have the word matreasance then.

I just thought having BA would be like having two small little new flatmates to look after, and it would be hard work looking after them.

But I had no concept of my identity shifting.

And now we understand it's a neurological shift as well.

That blindsided me.

But now and I.

Kind of think, oh gosh, imagine if we had known the word my tressns.

That would have that just would have shifted my perspective on it being a change for me.

Now I can give myself grace and kindness.

Well that is that is a word.

Perhaps, I mean that God says so many questions I need to ask you.

So firstly, let's go with my tresses because we this might be the first time that somebody that's been listening to our podcast has heard that, So can you define that for us please.

Yeah, it's very similar to adolescents.

So from my perspective as a neuroscientist but also a human mum in the world, both of these stages are enormous sort of social, psychological, physiological kind of identity and also neurological transitions.

So we can think about made tressance as being this you know from almost it starts before you even fall pregnant, perhaps once you start to consider motherhood and parenthood and what family life might look like or pregnancy might look like, and it encompasses all of the shifts of pregnancy.

We haven't talked about the neurobiology of pregnancy yet, which we will and then and then those kind of that process of becoming a mother in the same way that adolescence is about kind of moving from childhood to adulthood.

It's the process of becoming an adult.

And there's so many things that shift and change.

And I always think about our brains kind of being in the middle of our bodies, the bottom up changes of our body and the physiological signals, but also the outside and signals from the world.

How things change socially and then also like ab out top down psychological or mindset or identity shifts and made Tressence is just this word that describes that process of becoming a mother.

But I don't think it ever really stops, because, as I said, I'm now parenting.

You know, a son who's about to go off to you know, go backpacking in Asia tomorrow, which is very scary the next six weeks, and then go off head away to university.

And so much of parenting means you're kind of also reflecting back on your own childhood and your own experiences will certainly for me that has been so it's an enormous the idea that parenthood or motherhood is a way in which you change and shift and grow instead of as I thought it was just I would just be looking after and it would be very hard work looking after these little people who came to live in my house.

With me, and you're just a family.

Yeah, And you can be kinder on yourself as you go through this transformation and this adjustment and this you know, life gets you know, your entire life is thrown up in the air and falls down on all these pieces and you have to put yourself back together again.

And I didn't know that that was going to happen, and so that I always used to say, my boys are easy.

They slept well, they feared they you know, they were so unproblematic, they were so straightforward.

But I was like, oh my goodness, who am I?

I couldn't figure out who I was and who I was becoming?

And I couldn't and it took me a really long time to resolve that.

New identity psychotherapy helped, I think PEPs.

I could have done without that, had I know and to expect the identity shift.

That was normal.

And now I spent a lot of time sort of compartmentalizing my life rather than seeing me Bridgid as a whole person, which included me being a mother, being a career person.

You know, all of that together was the people that made me up.

Now I want to go to the neurobiology because it's fascinating.

So let's start first within pregnancy.

What are some of the changes from a neurobiological point.

Of view that happens in pregnancy?

This is like such a hot field neuroscience right now.

It's safe to say that how the female brain changes across the course of your first pregnant sees the biggest structural and network reorganization of the brain that you will see across your lifespan after adolescence.

So the brain changes and grows all the way through children and adolescence.

It's quite extraordinary.

And then you know it kind of levels out from pretty much the rest of your life span and you kind of hope you avoid the diseases of aging except pregnancy.

Along comes pregnancy and the very first studies that were done, and I must give a shout out to the researchers who were working in this space.

There were these three women I talk about them in Baby Brain.

I spoke to them for my books, Susanna Carme owner El Salina Hokxima and Erica Barba Muller.

Who were these three women, two Spanish, one Dutch working in a research lab in Spain.

They were doing brain imaging studies and they were in a car on the way to the pub to celebrate one of their PhD thesis have been submitted, and they started talking about what will happen to and then this woman said I think I might have a baby, and they were like, oh my goodness, what will happen?

To your brain, and.

They were sort of like throwing this idea around and the car and the way to the job, and instead of going, do we know what happens to the brain during pregnancy?

I was in two thousand and nine, so we don't have that when I had my babies.

Is you don't have like the internet on your phone.

You couldn't look up research papers.

And they became so obsessed with this idea they turned the car around and went back to the research lab so they could open up their computers and look up the studies.

True neuroscientists, I completely understand how and why they did that instead of going to the bar.

And then they kind of that night designed to study, said well, why don't we do the study.

We're in a brain imaging research lab.

No one else has looked what happens to a woman's brain across the course of her first pregnancy, and so they then themselves volunteered.

So what they did was they gathered a whole cohort of women and also the male partners of those women, and scanned those women's brains.

They had had to have never had a prior pregnancy, not even perhaps you know, a miscarriage scan what their brain structure looked like, they fell pregnant and then scanned their brain structure again after Now, it took quite a few years to gather up enough women because as we all know, we could have a brain scan and say right now, I'm going to go away and get pregnant, and it's not necessarily going to happen the next month.

So it takes a while to gather enough data for it to all be statistically sound.

And so that paper was published at the very end of twenty sixteen, so you know, a number of years, like seven years later, and what they saw was this extraordinary structural change in the female brain and in particular what they saw and the sounds always sounds like degeneration, but it is exactly what we see also during adolescents, as they saw gray out of volume loss, particularly in parts of cortex that were involved with social cognition.

And what we see during adolescence, and we now understand happening during pregnancy is and often we see this in other points in the lifespan, is the brain is driven towards efficiency.

It wants to streamline and refine and kind of double down on what it needs and kind of get rid of what it doesn't need, and sometimes this looks like gray matter volume loss, and when you see this during pregnancy and parts of the brain involved with thinking about what other people are thinking, and thinking about what other people are feeling and reacting and responding to other people's social cues.

Those are not just the random people out there in the world.

These are the cues that will enable you to react and respond appropriately to your baby once it's born.

So they saw this enormous structural change in women's brains that almost pregnancy is not just preparing your enabling your body to carry the baby and prepare your body for nourishing that baby and breastfeeding that baby once the baby's born, if it's how you choose to feed your baby, but it's also preparing your mind and your brain for the act of motherhood.

So we saw these women's brains become incredibly plastic and show the structural reorganization, and the degree of that reorganization was then directly correlated to how to symmetrics that they had of attachment once those babies were born, So how easily those women were able to then react and respond to their baby's cries or in there's various ways we can measure attachment, which sounds pretty kind of callous and scientific.

That's they're pretty well established techniques.

And then over the years, various other studies have gone and they've looked at kind of when do we see these biggest structural changes taking place, and they happen throughout the course of the pregnancy, and we know that they're now driven primarily by the hormones of pregnancy, by changing levels of estradile, by changing levels of progesterone.

Progesterone is the pro gestation hormone, but also other hormones of pregnancy, and another one of these being called prolactin, which is released both by the ovaries, by the brain, but also largely by the placenta.

Because the placina becomes like this giant indocrine organ or a giant gland, it's not just an interface for the baby and the mother.

It also releases and produces lots of hormones as well, which then make their way up into the mother's brain and sculpt her brain.

So these are neurological changes that we see that enable women to kind of deploy maternal behaviors that of course those maternal behaviors are not always guaranteed, but I guess the idea is mother Nature's changing the brain to try and make that learning curve a little less steep than it would be.

As if you were suddenly handed a baby that you hadn't birthed.

You could parent that baby, but it might take a lot longer to learn to react and respond to that baby.

They compared the brains of and we know that it was pregnancy that changed, that did this structural reorganization because they compared the brains of the fathers of those babies before and after their mother's first pregnancy, and the men's brains didn't change at all, you know, like in comparison to the woman's.

The structural change they saw was about a four percent of brain volume in these women, which is extraordinary.

You don't see that structural change taking place even if someone has a really serious psychiatric condition where you might think the brain is a really big player.

Here, pregnancy is this extraordinary neurological shift.

Other researchers have gone in and done all of these studies now like during pregnancy in motherhood, going if we image these women's brains are the networks kind of reacting and responding, and we kind of think, well, it's all about demise and decline because you know, we're telling us these stories about ourselves about baby brain, but they see that the networks and women's brains become more flexible and efficient and responsive.

Like that brain is more flexible, efficient and responsive than the brain of it that hasn't gone through pregnancy, right, A flexible, efficient, responsive brain that is able to react and respond more appropriately to cues from social cues from other people and primarily from the baby as a brain that's like shifted extraordinarily.

And we see these changes taking place in other mammalian mothers.

It doesn't matter whether you look at a sheep or a fox or a dolphin.

We would see those animals getting better at doing what they need to do to keep their offspring alive.

And the female human brain is no different.

But we focus primarily on what it is unable to do instead of understanding that reorganization has enabled it to respond to the baby.

Because we're still mammals, right when you know, we like to think that we're something special, but we're still mammals.

And there's been there's another there's quite a few Aussie you know, young Aussie.

You know women who work in the neuroscience space who are interrogating all of this as well.

And one of these is a woman, Bridget Callahan, or a neuroscientist who's over at UCL now, and she was really interested in this kind of ecologically relevant changes because she was like, if we look at other female, other mammalian mothers and look to see what happens to their brains when they become mothers, and we see them becoming more efficient and responsive and deploying the appropriate behaviors, why don't we look at instead of just using these old fashioned tests that are often designed to pick up like as someone getting early onset Alzheimer's disease and looking in pregnancy, why don't we design studies where we're testing women on ecologically relevant stimuli.

So what's an ecologically relevant stimuli?

If you're like a woman who's pregnant today, you know it's your first baby, it's the third trimestant, you know, you might you're probably shopping for strollers right or thinking about I don't know, whatever you think about these days, breast pumps or nappies or whatever.

And so they've designed studies snow where the stimuli is ecologically relevant to the kind of the culture that that woman is in.

So she did the study in New York and they were like getting all these pregnant New Yorkers and so they were looking they were kind of getting them to like kind of remember like high chairs and strollers and prices of these things and different types of baby related items.

So it sounds a little bit tripe, but they were like, what is ecologically relevant to this group of women, And those women showed remarkably better memories for these ecologically relevant stimuli than staplers and photo copies.

And they also tested the like office products, which is kind of a bit of a funny control.

But then also women who were not pregnant.

So there's lots of different ways we can kind of start interrogating how these sort of changes and reactions and responses take place.

And there's just so many women and so many research groups and o are neuroscientists out there looking at what is happening in these brains and starting to tell a little bit of a different story that's not solely focused on baby brain being about a deficit, but baby brain being about this and this like neurobiology of matrescence, this extraordinary reorganization.

They've even done studies looking at what's happening in women in like middle life and then later life women in their seventies, eighties, and nineties.

As we've started to have data emerge, Well, we've always known women live longer than men, but we've also had data starting to emerge whereby we can kind of look at some signals of say like Alzheimer's disease and dementia, and almost see signals emerging of a protective effective motherhood.

And so it's like, is that like multiple pregnancies and all of those, you know, all of that estrogen.

The estrogen dose you get across the course of one pregnancy is more than you get the entire rest of your life combined.

And everyone's banging on and worrying about the pearl and HRT.

You know, pregnancy is giving you like this lifetime dose and nine months.

Is that a protective factor for late later life aging?

Or is it the cognitive demands of parenting all of these years, Because it's like really cognitively and psychologically demanding to parent And I'm eighteen years in and it's still like challenging me every day is that like some kind of protective factor for late life aging.

And we can now get these large cohorts.

Of older women and we can pop their brain scans in like kind of an AI type machine learning program, and that can sort with reasonable reliability.

Now mother not mother, mother not mother, mother, mother, mother not mother with about kind of ninety percent accuracy.

Now, because the brains of mothers look slight even so slightly younger than the brains of non mothers later in life, those neurological shifts.

Last a life a lifetime as well.

So we're just learning so many things, but culturally, women are still stuck on the baby brain trope, which is doing such a disservice to neuroscience but also so disempowering and sad.

And so what I've just been trying.

To do all of these years is just sort of chep away and try and share some positives and upsides and good news.

I think it comes a lot down to worth, what a female thinks she's worth in the society, and often it's aligned to that sort of patriarchal I'm worth what I am because I'm you know, building a business or whatever it is I'm working in my career, and we've lost the way of the worth of the woman actually being the person that provides new humans, you know.

So it's sort of like, how do we support women in that?

Oh, my goodness, it's extraordinary.

We're amazing.

Yeah, I seah, I mean, I yeah, And I don't know.

No, no, you're going to make me cry because I think about how hard it was when my boys were little, and how mean I was, not mean I was to myself, but I always often say how little grace I gave myself and how extraordinary that was.

And we've just got such this narrow definition, and we do ourselves no favors not honoring this extraordinary kind of thing that we do as mothers.

And the neuroscience is telling such a good news story and it just drives me kind of crazy that we only ever hear the downsides and the negatives.

And of course we haven't even talked about post natal anxiety and depression and all of that.

And that's well, I did want to talk about that.

Yeah, I think we probably should talk about that, but it's best I like to not start talking about that because we should be talking about the upsides.

And I suppose it's a little bit like we were.

There's so much work it still needs to be done to support women who are struggling and not having a great time that we kind of forget about the strengths and the upsides.

And I feel like if we had strengths based language to describe motherhood, and I mean social media, like quite frankly, I thinkuse like the downfall of civilization.

Right now, I'm still starting to come around to this idea, seeing how damaging it can be.

And it's so hard as it so I can see how damaging it as for teenagers as well.

Like I'm now like I used to be on the fence about the social media band.

Now I'm like, bring it on.

I wish that had it happened.

Three years ago earlier my boys were, you know, in the midst of it all.

But I feel like we just got all this messaging.

And it's difficult as a science communicator, I'm imagining because it's the same as us.

So sometimes the message from a health scientist or from a doctor isn't quite as sexy, so you know, but you still have to be in that social media space.

That's where a lot of our target audience are getting their information.

So it is.

It's really difficult.

I'm I'm pleased to say that most people that listen to.

This drama frost the algorithms.

You got to have drama, that's right, and you've got to have a hook.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the menopause space, there was about three weeks ago now, there was this viral clip that went around saying that the brain eats itself without rmone replacement therapy, which was bonkers, a complete misunderstanding and twisting and dramatization of the actual story of what happens to the female brain dury menopause, and it was just utterly ridiculous, and the amount of time and effort it takes to tell the different story without being dramatic.

I just kind of chip away and kind of think there has to be a space for calm, clear, rational messaging and neuroscience communication, and that's kind of what I do without frothing the algorithms.

But it also gets kind of tiring.

Because you have to be careful about how your messaging will land because stories are never about all women all of the time.

Often it's some women.

And I must say that a hundred times to my students and my courses we might be talking about, say we're talking about posting out a depression.

It will be well, some women some of the time will have this experience, and this particular treatment or therapy may work in some women some of the time, but not all women having this experience.

All of the time.

There's so much individual variation, and we can almost kind of accept that.

We kind of think about each of our own pregnancies or pregnancies of the people around us.

My two pregnancies weren't the same, they weren't the same as my sisters.

They probably weren't the same as yours.

We can kind of accept that there's that individual variation.

But then we kind of on social media it becomes this kind of one message, which is but even.

In public health, it does.

In public health there it's run by protocols, and you know, sometimes people are put into a section of the birthing unit because that's what the protocol says, so that you know, I can get it that you know, from an individual level, sometimes it's not there either.

I wanted to talk about.

Maternal instinct before you said, you know, part of this rewiring and elasticity is about getting this maternal instinct but what about for those that just don't have maternal instinct or don't believe that they're maternal instinct?

What's happening in those brains?

Yeah?

I actually write have a whole chapter in my and my book Baby Brain on maternal instinct because when I was, but just before I sort of started writing this book, it's called Nesting, Nursing and Maternal Instincts.

There's a journalist over in the US, Chelsea Connor Boy who wrote who's writing a book about kind of the maternal brain sort of.

She was about a year ahead of where I was in my research and writing, and she wrote in New York Times.

Or one of those New York kind of articles New York or something that was had.

I'm sure she didn't come up with the headline, but that it was maternal instinct is a myth created by men.

Essentially.

It was trying to say, this concept of maternal instinct is about the patriarchy, and it was kind of patching, as I often think it's mother.

Nature versus the patriarchy.

Is it biological or is it social?

Of course, it's always somewhere in between whenever it comes to anything.

But then reading the comment, the comments people say, don't read the comments.

Fascinating to read the comments because what that phrase maternal instinct, How we define it, How we define it within the science the sciences, which has defined it in lots of different ways, depending on what sort of discipline of science you're in and what you're interested in studying.

But then how we define that culturally, and then how we make the shift from a cultural definition to you know, as I say, kind of understanding it as a neuroscientist, or understanding it as a psychologist, or you work in evolution, or you work in maternal health.

So I thought, well, I will survey my readers.

As I was writing my book, I would put the newsletter surveys out all the time, and I was like, what does the word maternal instinct mean to you?

And that was fascinating because there was different ways in which people defined that phrase.

So some people took it to mean that idea more of what we might call like a biological clock.

Well, I never had children because I never had any maternal instinct, like there was no drive to procreate.

I didn't want kids because I didn't feel I have maternal instincts.

And then other people will be like I never wanted kids, and then all of a sudden, I was desperate to have children, Like why did that happen?

At thirty two thirty three?

Like that, And so they took that to mean maternal instinct.

Some people took it to mean that moment you know your baby's first placed in your arms.

Some people were like, I was overwhelmed with love.

Other people were like, I just was like, shit, what have I done?

And some people are ambivalent.

Some people are like, have had a traumatic birth, they don't get to meet their baby for a while.

Some people were.

Just consumed with love and I feel like I've known you my whole life and everything in between.

And then the word maternal instinct would be seen to be present or absent, depending on what that experience was like and how we've kind of made meaning of that moment and time, which can have ramifications if it's not necessarily positive, because if you don't feel like what you think you should feel, you can be consumed with guilt.

And I'm sure you're more familiar with, you know what the ramifications of how that can affect how you may mother and you know, parent that child down the track, et cetera.

So there was that kind of idea of what maternal instinct was or wasn't, whether it was present or absent, And then other people took it to mean almost what I might think about now, Like say I can hear one of my other boys walking down the stairs.

I'm say I'm sitting on the sofa and I can hear someone walking down the stairs.

I will almost know what their mood is by the sound of their footsteps, but without thinking about it consciously, I'll just be like, oh, here comes a happy or here comes a sad kid.

Oh wonder what's wrong with salite?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, or as soon as you see their face, you know what kind of day they've had, and your soul before you think about seeing them, before you've consciously processed that.

And some people would think talk about that being maternal instinct, just instinctively knowing about what's happened with your child, and so lots of there's lots there's so many different words in there, and it's quite culturally loaded, because I suppose the idea is I've described these neurological shifts that take place during pregnancy that make the brain very plastic to enable you to be able to learn to react and respond to your baby's cues.

Perhaps the intention I suppose from mother nature is that it makes it easier to learn, But we've still got to learn to react and respond.

It's not suddenly as if you know what to do, because you don't know what to do once your baby arrives.

You've got to learn how to react and respond and parent.

And we've always been alloparents as mammals, right, We've always parented with other people around us to support us, whether that be you know, our mothers, or our partners, or our sisters or that community.

And we learned and saw how other people parented and mothered their babies, and then we learn how to do that too.

And the idea is your brain is highly plastic, as it is during adolescence as it is during infan and see, so the experiences we have enable us to kind of learn we don't.

It's not like it's how to be a mum is you know, downloaded from the ether during pregnancy.

So that's one way to kind of, yeah, to kind of think about pregnancy.

And I went to a breastfeeding class that was offered by my maternity hospital before I had my first son, and then lots of people are like, well, there's no point in learning how to breastfeed until you've got the baby there.

But I went along.

Anyway, and then I was interviewing some of these maternal health educators and they were saying, Oh, there's been a real decline and women coming along during pregnancy to learn motherhood skills or what we might call them these days, and it's still you've still got to learn these things.

The baby doesn't pop out with the set of instructions that you automatically absorbed, which is what we may think maternal instinct means.

So some maternal brain researchers are even moving away from wanting to use these words instinct because it does sound a little bit like behaviors that are prepackaged up will roll out or matically and said, there's various behaviors and then because we're humans wrapped up on that of thoughts and feelings and expectations, and then you're holding the baby in your arms, and then you're going, well, I'm not feeling what I should, so then there's shame, and then there's this feedback loop.

Yeah, I really hope that people have listened to that carefully, and you know, go back and have another listen, because there is so much sort of expectation and shame wrapped up in the need to have maternal instinct, and it just I love it that you've said it looks different for so many different people, because yes, my first experience was like literally when I had my fourth boy and the obstetrician said, oh, you do this very well, and I thought, well, it's a fourth Caesar.

I'm just here and she said no, no, no, you've got another boy.

And I went, oh shit.

And so you know that wasn't maternal instinct.

Now, but I know what you mean.

I can I can see by the look on each boy's shoulders.

You know what sort of day they add.

I know exactly whether it's food or sleep or water or like.

I kind of you know that that is my maternal instinct.

I just often sleep and water they need to be topped up.

So, Sarah, what does the neuroscientists say about anxiety and depression and post natal depression in pregnancy and postpartum.

What do we know about that?

Now?

There's some interesting new research emerging around anxiety.

So let's just put that aside for a moment and.

I'll try and be brief.

If I think about something like depression at any point in the lifespan, age or life stage, but particularly pregnancy and early motherhood, I always think, as I say, I take a biopsychosocial approach, the brain is making meaning of the signals from our bottom up body what's happening in the world around us.

And then the meaning we're making of that.

We kind of talked about the meaning making we would make of expectations of a maternal instinct, and if you think postpartum, especially like from the bottom up, we've come off the high of all of these hormones of pregnancy, and women, particularly those who are perhaps more hormonally sensitive, whose brains and bodies react and respond quite a lot to those shifts of hormones, and some women it's barely a rapper, and other women it's like a tsunami that they're you know, they're riding that rollercoaster of hormones.

There's that sensitivity there as you're going and making that big adjustment.

And then, of course, depending on what kind of birth you have, you know how just those first few weeks of motherhood are a lot even if it's all gone really well, and we know also that women who are socially isolated or don't have the same kind of support networks around them are also going to be more vulnerable.

So we've got that kind of outside and an influence and then that kind of meaning we're making of that.

So it's almost and many women, a perfect storm for the emergence of something like you know, depression or mood disorders, etc.

And there are perhaps as many experiences which would contribute to that as there would be kind of treatments and ways out.

Maybe someone just needs to also be mothered and looked after and make sure that they're eating well and you know, being supported to sleep when they can.

You know, we need the kind of the cavalry to kind of be called in.

I just want to mention some new research that's emerging around anxiety, because I think that again, this might be really helpful, particularly for first time mothers.

Some what it's been done here in Australia is a neuroscience researcher, Bronwyn Graham in particular, who's working on this.

This idea that when we kind of come off the hormones and you know birth, particularly your first pregnancy, we're often very very hyper vigilant, So our nervous system is often like very very wide and very very tired.

When nervous systems get very kind of hypervigilant and hyper reactive and responsive, our brains often start to kind of fill in the gap.

It's a little bit like if you're a bit kind of on edge, you wake up at three am, you will find ten thousand things to worry about straight away.

And your first pregnancy or your first first experiences of motherhood, what that often emerges as as these intrusive thoughts of harm coming to your baby.

So you think, if you walk like from the carpet onto the bathroom tiles, you're going to drop the baby and it will smash on the floor, it will fall out the window, You'll forget to strap it in the car, and it'll you know, fire around the car if the car stops suddenly, it'll roll down the stairs.

Like these are all very real, catastrophic and intrusive thoughts that almost one hundred percent of women have, particularly with the arrival of their first baby, and around fifty percent of women will also have intrusive thoughts of themselves harming their babies, which is often not talked about because of course, there's so much.

Shame in there.

This has started to become recognized as this kind of phenomenon that lots of women have, and I say first pregnancy because it's much much less likely with the second pregnancy, And there are some ideas we could approach that kind of from an evolutionary psychology perspective.

Lots of people don't like, but perhaps this is mother Nature's way of, well, you are learning how to parent for that baby you catastrophy.

The worst case scenarios is a way of kind of learning how to protect and react and respond to your baby.

When you're in that learning process of learning to mother, you work out the worst case scenarios so you can figure out how to look after your baby and protect your baby.

What's problematic is if these intrusive thoughts don't fade away, And studies have been done thinking kind of around four or five, six, seven weeks, a lot of these intrusive thoughts naturally and most women sort of start to disappear.

But in women in which they don't and or they start to interfere with daily life, which is, you know, kind of a sign of mental health problems, it could be a precursor for postnatal anxiety, and we often see anxiety maybe going hand in hand with something like postnatal depression.

And so it's like, how do we educate women that if you have these thoughts, they're almost to be expected and normal, But there's so much shame involved with them.

And it's only once women start talking about having these that we can normalize that experience and then keep an eye on when they could potentially become problematic.

And I remember this so clearly.

With my first son, I didn't really have someone.

With my second son, it was almost like my body and brain knew how to parent by the top of the second time.

But the first time, I had a second floor apartment, and I remember really must have been the first week of kind of having him, and I wouldn't walk from the living room into the sun room because it was because Vince said, fall off the balcony, even though I would have needed to die a set of doors and walk outside.

So that's so common, but we don't talk about it because there's been a lot of shame.

And so there's researchers working on this right now, and I think that lots of women can kind of feel comforted by the fact there's nothing wrong with you.

Yeah, that's so great.

I think we might leave it there.

Sarah, thank you so much for your time.

But I do want to end with a couple of I don't know reframing from you about if you say that let's replace baby brain with other terminology, what is that other terminology?

I think baby like stick with baby brain, but understand what the neuroscites of baby brain is that our brains are rewide and reorganized for the better, for strengths and upsides.

And when we experience forgetfulness, it's not our brains letting us down.

It's our brains trying to do their best in the world in which they're trying to learn how to parent.

And I think, just just give yourself some grace and some kindness and some understanding.

Hopefully that will give people some comfort and some new stories to tell, because the stories that we tell drive our experiences.

Thank you so much, Sarah, that that's just a wonderful way to end, and I hope people get so much out of that and start giving themselves that grace that you've talked about.

Thank you so much for joining us.

You're so welcome.

Well, thank you everyone, for listening.

That was the last episode for us for the year.

We hope that you have a really great Christmas and silly season.

Hope it's not too silly.

I hope you just have lots of fun.

If you're worried over the Christmas time about what to eat, it's always a bit of an issue with all the different Christmas barbecues and buffets, just go back and have a listen to our food episode, Safety in Food, in Pregnancy, and if you're struggling with anything else, just we've got some really great episodes in our back catalog, and coming in the new year, we're going to be really focused on fertility, so we've got a couple of episodes.

Coming out about how to get you pregnant?

All right, everyone, until then, have a really fabulous Christmas.

Thanks for being with us on this journey for this year, and we look forward to next year twenty twenty six, where we start over again and help you grow all those babies.

Until then, keep well, keep safe, you're growing your babies, and we'll be back in your ears then.

Five and our.

Hey, even though doctor Pat is well a doctor, when we get lots of other doctors and other experts on our podcast.

I just need to remind you that this podcast is for informational purposes only.

We share lots of medical insights and experience, but everything we talk about is general in nature and may not apply to.

Your specific situation.

Please always consult with your own healthcare provider for your individual medical advice.

When you grow your baby,