Give Birth, Get Smart

It probably won’t work as an incentive for having babies, but a study conducted by neuroscientists at Yale University found that having a baby may make women more intelligent.

It probably won’t work as an incentive for having babies, but a study conducted by neuroscientists at Yale University found that having a baby may make women more intelligent. They found that a woman’s grey matter—cells that process information—expands in quantity in the weeks and months after she gives birth.

It is thought that hormonal activities during pregnancy and especially childbirth ‘supercharge’ the brain. The areas that grow in the brain are associated with motivation, reasoning, judgement, the processing of emotions and feelings of satisfaction. All these are critical to a mother-child relationship. Interestingly, mothers who gushed most about their babies experienced the biggest increase in grey matter.