Are 'Mommy Brains' Smarter?

Many women use the phrase "the mommy brain" to describe the damage mothering may do to their brains. They often kid about We often joke about its effects: losing their car in the parking lot, for instance.

But author Katherine Ellison begs to differ.
In her new book, "The Mommy Brain," the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, veteran foreign correspondent, and working mother of two young boys contends there's a lot of scientific evidence that motherhood can improve mothers' minds, in many ways. She says motherhood forces women's brains to work more efficiently, thereby making mothers smarter.

Mothers are learning machines, just like the babies are, and mothers have to learn to navigate and provide for their babies, Ellison points out to The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.

She says she got the idea to write the book when, as reporter in Brazil, she had a dream that space aliens had invaded, and she couldn't decide whether it was a story!

That "told me how afraid I was that my brain was just turning to mush," she remembered.

Ellison says says women hurt themselves by joking about it. If they tell themselves they're not up to the job and that motherhood is taking their neurons away, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy and lead them to perform more poorly.

Ellison tells Smith there are studies showing that motherhood can boost learning and memory capacity, and there's other research that shows mothers have internal hormonal mechanisms that help them cope with stress. Getting daily practice honing those skills, as most mothers do with such things as negotiating and being alert, help focus the mind, she adds.

Another way mothers are smarter is that they become better time managers. As moms have to do more, they find ways to do it and become more efficient. They have tougher deadlines than ever, because the child's deadlines must be met -- a baby must eat or the day care center is closing for the day.

Dealing with stress is definitely another thing moms become better at, as is making friends. Befriending new people or groups may not sound like a major element of becoming smarter, but studies show that making friends and social networks help people to keep their minds active for much longer in life. Children are always bringing you something new and the novelty is fantastic for your brain, Ellison adds.And, contrary to some perception shown in studies, working mothers often become better performers in the workplace, Ellison asserts: All the skills that moms learn are skills that can help a manager.

Ellison wouldn't go so far as to say that companies are valuing specific skills that mothers develop, but they do realize that they have to keep women workers, and some organizations are coming up with really good solutions, such as on-site childcare.

Ellison warns that, clearly, working mothers today need a lot more support, but many have gotten into a mode of complaining. That negative mindset makes it worse for working moms and their kids.

Ellison says she hopes the studies she writes about can give women more reason to be positive and confident in themselves as people and workers. A lot of the effort is going to be house-to-house or office-to-office, and women won't win if they don't have confidence, she concludes.

The following excerpt of "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter" is reproduced here with express permission of its publishers, Basic Books. Any other use of this material is prohibited without the express consent of Basic Books. Al rights reserved.

Smartsmartadj (bef.12c) 1: making one smart: causing a sharp stinging 2: marked by often sharp forceful activity or vigorous strength (a ~ pull of the starter cord) 3: BRISK, SPIRITED 4 a: mentally alert: BRIGHT.
MERRIAM WEBSTER'S
COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY

A few weeks after my first son was born, I had a troubling dream.

It was September 1995, and I was on leave from my job as a foreign correspondent in Rio de Janeiro. In my nightmare, space aliens had landed in Brazil's capital, Brasilia, but I stayed home, unable to decide whether the story was worth pursuing. The dream was the perfect showcase for my fear that I'd traded in my brain for my new baby.

It was just that fear that had kept me, and so many of my peers, from having babies at all, right up until we'd almost lost the chance to choose. The problem was that I'd come to depend upon my brain for so many good things, including my livelihood, my self-esteem, and my freedom to marry for love. And I knew that becoming a mother made me subject to a modern affliction called Mommy Brain-which, like a "senior moment" is a cheery synonym for abrupt mental decline. The phrase summons the image of a ditsy pregnant woman who weeps at Kleenex commercials, or of a frazzled mom with nothing in her head but carpool schedules and grocery lists. ("If you've left the crayons to melt in the car / And forgotten just where the car keys are / There's a perfectly good way to explain: / You see, you've come down with "Mommy Brain," reads a poem by one self-alleged victim.)

Along with varicose veins and thickened waistlines, diminished cerebral capacity would appear to be a risk inherent in women's reproductive fate. That's certainly how many nonparents perceive pregnant women and new mothers. When researchers showed audiences videotapes of a woman in various workplace situations-the same woman, the same work, but in some scenes wearing a prosthesis so that she'd appear pregnant-the "pregnant" woman was rated less competent and less qualified for promotion. We mothers also perpetuate this bias. "Mommy Brain!" is our frequent alibi when we say something dumb. "Part of your brain exits with the placenta!" one friend advised me early on.

The pessimistic chorus wasn't always this loud. The phrase "Mommy Brain," which is of relatively recent vintage, followed the historic flood of women into the workplace beginning in the 1960s. This change brought new scrutiny from others-and a new self-consciousness for mothers. Today nearly three-fourths of mothers with children aged one or older are at work outside the home, frequently in jobs requiring mental sharpness, making many of us more vigilant than ever before about fluctuations in our mental acuity. And not only do our jobs require more brain power; rearing children today amidst information overload and furious debates over nearly every aspect of parenting takes more smarts than ever.

Now, few moms would deny that children challenge our mental resources. The hormonal roller-coaster, sleep deprivation, biased bosses, brainless chores, and too much Raffi are just part of the toll. Because men, despite some notable recent progress, still aren't equitably sharing these burdens, we're left with a mostly female predicament. But what makes it all harder is a residue of feminism. The same fierce rhetoric that gave women the courage to brave an unwelcoming job market created a harrowing "Mommy Brain" image for today's mothers, myself included, who were then coming of age.

In 1963, in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan compared women who devote themselves to the home to "walking corpses." Such women, she wrote, "have become dependent, passive, childlike; they have given up their adult frame of reference to live at the lower human level of food and things. The work they do does not require adult capabilities; it is endless, monotonous, unrewarding." A few years later, movie goers and novel readers would meet the vivid embodiment of Friedan's brain-dead momma in Tina, the dithering, pill-popping heroine of a best seller aptly titled Diary of a Mad Housewife.

The doom-saying didn't end with the last century. It remains a private and surprisingly frequent public refrain today. "Anyone who tells you that having a child doesn't completely and irrevocably ruin your life is lying," muses the character Julie Applebaum, who, in Nursery Crimes, the 2001 novel written by the retired public defender Ayelet Waldman, gives up a career as a public defender to stay home with her new daughter. "Everything changes. Your relationship is destroyed. Your looks are shot. Your productivity is devastated. And you get stupid. Dense. Thick. Pregnancy and lactation make you dumb. That's a proven scientific fact."

It's far from "scientific fact," as we shall see. But this sort of stuff is discouraging to read if you happen to be a mother. So is the following self-deprecating comment made by Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen as she reflects in 2004 on her own reproductive transition: "It was as though my ovaries had taken possession of my brain. Less than a year later an infant had taken possession of everything else. My brain no longer worked terribly well, especially when I added to that baby another less than two years later, and a third fairly soon after that."

During those same years, it's worth noting, Quindlen won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in the New York Times and wrote several successful novels and advice books. No small accomplishments for this mother of three. Yet for some reason, Quindlen feels obliged to assure readers that motherhood has dulled her intellect.

Maybe she's just bowing to peer pressure. Polls in recent decades have tracked a marked decline in many parents' satisfaction with the job of rearing children, a trend owing greatly to the perceived price we pay. Complaining about what our children have done to our finances, moods, hips, and brains has become a fashionable pastime at parties as well as the theme of several recent books. Senility is something you inherit from your kids, we joke. But the new parental angst is serious, and no doubt part of the reason so many women have delayed childbearing right up to the brink of menopause.

I got in just under the wire. By the time I gave birth, at what my obstetrician politely called my "advanced maternal age," I'd waited so long that it was already hard to say whether "Mommy Brain" or early onset of senility was more to blame for my occasional mental lapses. Joey was born when I was thirty-eight years old, Joshua three years later. I knew I was taking the risk of never having children by waiting so long. But I feared that brain damage might cost me the job I'd wanted ever since I was a child.

I was raised in the suburbs, the youngest of four children; my parents were a physician and his stay-at-home wife, a college beauty queen who had dropped out of school to marry. We called my mother "the geisha" when we weren't calling her "the martyr." The family legend was that her fate, and ours, depended upon my father's brilliance. Yet, as I realized only much later, the very perpetration of this legend proved my mother's smarts. She worked under the radar to accomplish her goals, networking at a furious pace to establish her family in the community and further her children's prospects. She waited until I had left for college before earning her own degree; and for ten years thereafter, she taught elementary school children afflicted with learning disabilities.Although my mother's personal example implied that women's chief priority is to serve their families, she not only took pride in her two daughters' achievements but also encouraged our career plans. We took this for granted, assuming that, unlike her, we were too smart to waste our time cooking and cleaning. All my siblings became medical doctors, but I left the fold early on. At sixteen, I traveled to Nicaragua, then ruled by Anastasio Somoza, as an Amigos de las Americas medical volunteer. I was shocked to learn of my government's support for a dictator who was stealing humanitarian aid and stifling dissent. If more Americans knew, I thought, the support would have to end.

I returned home determined to become a foreign correspondent, and five years later I was hired at the San Jose Mercury News. Soon, I was reporting from Central America, a job that produced one major collateral benefit: In 1982, in a government press room in Managua, I met the man I would eventually marry. Jack was a freelance writer traveling through Nicaragua, and we courted for the next eight years before marrying and settling in Rio, when the Miami Herald hired me as their correspondent. Three years later, I was pregnant with Joey.

As I watched my body morph, I prepared for more permanent changes. For most of my life, I'd enjoyed the control and freedom that come with an observer's point of view. Motherhood, I suspected, would cost me a lot. And I was right. But it was then still impossible to imagine what I would gain.

We stayed in Rio for the next four years. In 1999, we moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area, one year after the birth of Joey's brother, Joshua. Jack quit freelancing in return for a steady job, and I quit the Herald to write a book about environmental conservation. In the process, we switched from our previous Brazilian model of nanny-supported childcare to the contemporary U.S. suburban style, which meant that I would try to do everything at once.

This at last was true Mommy Brain terrain, a land of 24/7 distractions, silly music, and such bleakly repetitive duties as wiping pee from the toilet seat. My psychiatrist sister, Jean, whose children by that time were in college, understood my distress when she called one night as I was simultaneously trying to cook dinner and break up a fight over a Pokemon card, an AT&T computer technician on call-waiting. "Don't worry," she said, responding to the shrill pitch of my greeting. "The damage isn't permanent."

But by then, I'd already come to a startling conclusion. I didn't feel particularly damaged, after all. True, I was complaining a lot more. But I was also accomplishing more. Though I often felt frazzled, I was more motivated, excited by all I was learning at work and at home. My children not only had inspired my future-oriented interest in the environment but also had provided me with the "excuse" to insist on a more flexible work life; this, in turn, allowed me more creativity. The children were also giving me constant lessons in human nature: theirs and my own.

Although I'd had newspaper deadlines before, never had I faced the unparalleled urgency of a baby who needed to breastfeed, or a preschool teacher at close of day, both of which taught me a new kind of focus. Within two years of our move to California, despite constant interruptions, I 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 afflicted with early-stage leprosy. I had many more reasons for worry, yet, to my surprise, I felt calmer. And I kept running into other mothers who felt the same way.Could I have entered this phase of more professional fulfillment and lasting relationships if I had not had children? Was it all just a function of the purported wisdom that comes with age? I don't think so. Instead, I was beginning to believe there was more to the Mommy Brain than I had ever imagined. Maybe it wasn't all bad news. And so, in time filched from freelancing, housework, and childcare, I began to probe beyond the cliché.

I was encouraged early on by a report I'd read in 1999 about two Virginia neuroscientists and researchers, Craig Kinsley and Kelly Lambert. They had compared the performance of mother and bachelorette rats on a learning and memory test and discovered that the mothers led the pack. Further, these learning and memory advantages appeared to last long into the rats' golden years, well after they'd stopped reproducing. When the two researchers published their results in the prestigious journal Nature that year, they generated a small burst of publicity, including one headline that boldly declared: "Motherhood Makes Women Smarter."

As I continued to dig, I found that Kinsley and Lambert weren't alone in their perception of a transformed, and even improved, Maternal Brain. Eventually, I interviewed dozens of scientists in the United States and overseas, many of whom have been generating evidence powerful enough to eradicate the Mommy Brain stigma. My excitement grew as I realized they were forging a new frontier of knowledge that was just as dynamic and far-reaching as the previous decade's study of gender differences.

In contrast to the traditional "parenting studies" focused on the child, this newer work investigates the impact of parenthood on parents. It revolves around one pivotal idea: By means of a dynamic combination of love, genes, hormones, and practice, the female brain undergoes concrete and likely long-lasting changes through the process of giving birth and raising children. It's a transformation on as grand a scale as puberty and menopause, though in the past it has rarely been treated as such. Yet what is especially moving about the transition to motherhood is that it does not take place in isolation, as do puberty and menopause, but happens as part of an enduring relationship-the most passionate crucible of a relationship there is. For the two minds immediately involved, and all the other lives those minds eventually touch, the consequences can be profound.

We are all used to hearing that motherhood is a time when "everything changes." Yet the idea that motherhood concretely changes our brains seemed strange and wonderful to me. In February 2003, I published a feature story based on my preliminary research in Working Mother magazine. I described how the Mommy Brain phenomenon may be part of our modern social experiment in which women, more than ever, are trying to have their minds in two places at once. I also recounted some of the condition's well-known challenges and lesser-known strengths. The reaction convinced me I'd hit a nerve. "Thank you!" one working mother wrote. "Your article has put my concerns at bay . . . while I may sometimes mail my credit card payments to the wrong address, I can in one instant quote test results to a client, while in another remember where my daughter left her purple Barbie shoe." I was also finding that every time I mentioned the phrase, "what motherhood does to your brain," the topic ignited huge interest and debate. Suspecting that I had scratched the surface of a new and largely untold scientific story, I decided to write this book.

As I interviewed scientists in the months that followed, I combined my research with my own hands-on experiments in rearing my two young sons, Joey and Joshua. My boys have variously been described as "high-spirited," "high-energy," and "high-maintenance" by their teachers, and as wilde chayas, Yiddish for wild animals, by my parents. Yet, in ways I felt driven to explore, my children kept leaving me not just physically spent but mentally energized. At the same time, leading scientists I spoke with were confirming my suspicion that motherhood might actually help improve the mind. "From a neurological viewpoint, it's a revolution for the brain when you have a child," says Michael Merzenich, a pioneering expert on brain development at the University of California at San Francisco. "It is life-changing in the sense that you are presented with physical, mental, mechanical challenges-forty-nine disasters to take care of once. It's an epoch of learning and brain-induced changes, because everything matters so much. . . . I don't think there are a lot of better things you can do for your brain than have a child."

Motherhood is far too complex and variable a condition for anyone to argue that mothers, as a rule, are smarter than women who have not given birth. Furthermore, most advantages gained from the experience depend not only on your circumstances but on your attitude. If you're under debilitating stress, for instance, you're obviously likely to miss out on many benefits. Still, after what I've learned, I feel confident in proposing that a Mommy Brain should be thought of less as a cerebral handicap and more as an advantage in the lifelong task of becoming smart.

By "smart" I mean much more than the ability to multiply two-digit numbers in your head. I have in mind instead the kind of "bright" that translates into enhanced perception, efficiency, resiliency, motivation, and social skills (or "emotional intelligence"). In these first-order survival capacities-which I'm calling the five attributes of the baby-boosted brain-mothers' capacities can be most strengthened, a process I detail in the heart of this book.

In the pages that follow, I also take you with me on my quest to track down what we know about the powerful mental advantages that motherhood can bestow. You'll witness in Virginia revolutionary lab experiments on brainy mother rats; at Yale University, sophisticated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) exams tracking the brain behavior of new parents; and in California's Silicon Valley, an innovative childcare project that helps mothers be their smartest at work.

Throughout this book, my emphasis will be on mothers, because mothers clearly undergo the most dramatic physical changes in giving birth, and because, throughout human history, mothers have devoted much more of their time and attention to their children than anyone else. (In 2004, the first U.S. government survey to quantify this well-known fact found that the average contemporary working woman was spending about twice as much time as the average working man on household chores and childcare.)

Furthermore, recent research, described in Chapter 3, suggests that mothers may be-as has long been suspectedmore "hard-wired" to respond to their infants. Even so, Mommy Brain gains aren't limited to mommies, and I show how fathers, other caregivers, and every day altruists can also partake of the advantages of caring proximity to children. I also reveal how some particularly smart mothers and managers have made the most of parents' special skills in the workplace. Along the way, I offer insights from mothers I've interviewed-including mothers who are also professional scientists, and who have turned their informed and painstaking attention onto their own experiences. Several of these experts share their advice about how to make the most of your own Mommy Brain.

That most women have the potential to become smarter with motherhood may turn out to be one of this century's most hopeful ideas. It's time for mothers to recognize that-as Joshua once whispered in my ear, to my amazed pride (until I learned he'd stolen it from Pooh's Grand Adventure)-"You're stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."