Mom's brain

The Eksmo Publishing House represents the book of Abigail Tucker Mamin Brain. How to understand yourself to become an ideal mother for her child. Scientific justification to our cockroaches, chips and fads ”(translation by Alexei Zakharov).

The Book of Ebigail Tucker, the mother of four children and the part-time scientist-geneticist, talks about how the thinking and consciousness of a woman is changing irrevocably after she becomes a mother. It is not surprising that until recently, an absolutely normal girl, having become pregnant, suddenly becomes imaginary and hysterical, and having given birth to a crazy partridge shaking over her baby? Why do we change with the birth of children, and change irrevocably? It turns out that the point is not just in the hormonal restructuring of the body, the fact is that our female brain is subjected to male DNA attacks. The placenta - the baby’s house consists of it completely. It affects the entire device of a woman, makes his way to the brain and includes the same incredible regime - “motherhood”. At the same time, the human appearance is least dependent on instincts. We do not know how to properly apply to the baby’s chest. What is there, if we are not told the secret, how to do it faster, then we will accustom the baby for three years to the pot. In a word, instincts are not our strength. Another thing is social contacts. This smart, interesting and incredibly cheerful book opens our eyes on the most unexpected aspects of motherhood:

- Why the convinced Childfrey after giving birth suddenly goes crazy in his screaming lump.

- As a state and ... the mood of a woman at the time of conception affects the floor of the unborn child.

- What hides the placenta: Daddy Genes in the fight against mom's.

- When the irreversible occurs: the brain of a woman turns into a mother’s brain.

We offer to read a fragment of the book.

Sometimes it seems that scientists from the Grossmanian School of Medicine of New York University are in contact with aliens, and do not study mothers. In one corner of a huge laboratory in wrapped wires, a test tube is bubbled with a transparent substance - an artificially created spinal fluid. Nearby, in a purple bucket with ice, small glass pipettes rest. The postdoxterant [1] Sumin Sleep with the help of forceps takes something similar to a large white snowflake of a glass in which real storms are raging.

This is a piece of the brain from which blood is pumped out. About fifteen minutes ago, the whole brain was entirely inside the mouse - however, a mouse that has not yet become a mother. She literally became a virgin sacrificed.

“Her brain is actually still alive,” Sleep says, trying to keep him in this state: he bathed it in an artificial cerebrospinal fluid and maintained a “mouse” temperature - 35 degrees. He wants some neurons to continue to function, and we can “spy” behind them.

“We, in fact, are trying to eavesdrop on the mother’s brain,” Robert Frumke told me a few minutes earlier. - We divide it into parts and try to understand how it works.

His team pays special attention to the auditory cortex, which processes sounds, in particular, absolutely definite sounds:

- We are trying to explore low -level brain structures that react to the acoustic color of children's screams.

Ultrasonic cries for help that mice most often publish when they are cold, act on childless mice, like a creak of a nail on glass. Including because of this they avoid mice. But for mothers, the same sounds are similar to the song of sirens, and they run to them, like ships to reefs. Moms prefer a woeful squeak of cubs even the sounds of music. What makes mothers hear everything so differently?

A dream puts a slice of brain of an unborn mouse under a microscope. It increases the area in which the auditory bark is located - first four times, then in forty. In such an approximation, the “landscape” of the mouse brain resembles a huge gray desert. Soon the dream finds one of the so -called pyramidal neurons that he was looking for.

“Here is our neuron,” he says, managing the microscope with a characteristic dexterity. (“I spent a lot of quarters in the slot machine room,” he admits). Having brought the almost invisible glass pipette closer to the target cage, it is preparing to perform a procedure known as a “recording of the entire cage”. Sometimes it is jokingly called the "kissing" of the neuron.

“I am literally smoking,” a dream tells me.

It brings his mouth to the end of the long tube and begins to draw into the air until a dimple forms on the surface of a cell located under our probe. At times, smoking sounds are even heard - almost the same as those that are distributed when I cover her son's chubby cheeks before he manages to get out.

By accidentally blowing up the first neuron, he quickly led to the next, inserting a glass pipette under the membrane to find out what is happening inside. The goal is to measure the reaction of a single brain cell when it is stimulated. Then the dream passes through the entire drug an electric current. This stimulus imitates something very important: real electrical impulses produced with the screams of an abandoned mouse.

A pipette attached to the cage serves as a small electrode, reading the readings. On a nearby monitor, we observe the reaction of a single neuron of a childless mouse on a graph that looks like a cardiogram. He gives out a series of small jumps - his own electric signal.

A dream repeats this process almost endlessly, comparing the readings of dozens of cells of unborn mice and dozens of cells giving birth to find how their reactions differ to the cry of the cub. Typically, the neurons of mothers light up, but neurons of childless mice give out zilch. This means that mother's cells react stronger, giving powerful jumps.

This is the history of maternal sensitization at the level of one cell.

One of the key sensitors (or, if you like, secret ingredients of motherhood), which helps to explain why the “girls” neurons are so different from the “mommy” neurons are hormone oxytocin, which is produced in the brain called the hipalamus. “Oxytocin” means “rapid birth”: this hormone enters the bloodstream during the birth in large quantities - just when the placenta with its estrogen and progesterone leaves the body - stimulating the reduction of the uterus and the release of milk.

Recently, scientists have become interested in how it affects the brain. Sometimes oxytocin is called a “hormone of love” or “hormone of trust” (yes, men are also produced in men); It is associated with social and romantic relations and even with such activities as charity. Frumke and other scientists suspect that oxytocin not only prepares the female body for childbearing: he also plays the role of a neurotransmitter, preparing the brain to adore babies. Most likely, oxytocin is one of those invisible substances in the blood of rat-matters that transformed childless rats during those very intriguing laboratory experiments forty years ago.

Scientists from the Frumke laboratory decided to check whether they can with the help of oxytocin see how the rodent’s brain is transformed from “girlish” into “mother” in real time. They prepared a series of experiments, the results of which were published in 2015, now considered classic [2] .

Leading researcher, Bianca Jones Marlin, borrowed her high -tech tools from the new industry - optogenetics. She chose unborn mice, whose DNA was modified in such a way that it encoded the production of brain cells sensitive to light. In this case, the blue light from the laser illuminating the head of the mouse stimulated the flow of oxytocin.

Marlin attributed these genetically modified mice to the sound booth equipped in the laboratory, which would not be lost in any recording studio, and implanted the brain probes that read information from individual neurons. (Approximately the same thing that I did with Sumin Son, only in the experiment, Marlin was still inside the squeaks, breathing mice). She put them a record of anxious screams mouse, but this was clearly not impressed with mice. Their brains reacted with typical indifference, at times with irritation.

And then she turned on the blue light.

The auditory bark was flooded with oxytocin, as during childbirth. When a record of anxious screams sounded again, the brains of mice began to react differently, giving more characteristic jumps. Three hours later, the testimony of childless mice became the same as those of the birth. The effect of oxytocin somehow sensitized their neurons, making more sensitive to screams.

“Seeing this for three hours was simply amazing,” says Marlin. - We repeated the process of birth at the level of one neuron. When this happened for the first time, my goosebumps ran through my skin, and tears appeared in my eyes.

It turned out that the brains of the mice-sample are designed in such a way as to absorb this whole stream of oxytocin.

Throughout life, both males and females have few oxytocin receptors - both in the brain and in the body. But the Frumke team discovered a unique jump in the number of receptors in the left auditory bark of females of mice, which passed puberty and were ready to mate (that is, about twenty days). This group of scientists is completely focused on the auditory area of ​​the brain, but most likely, similar jumps in the number of receptors occur in other places, possibly in those areas of the brain that are responsible for other senses. It seems that some of the special neurological equipment, which helps to cope with the chemical stream arising during detection, is originally built into us.

Since the autopsy of living people is prohibited, much less is known about the natural distribution of oxytocin receptors in our brain. But the data available to us allow us to say that oxytocin modulates maternal behavior from people - and when we howl during childbirth, and what sounds much more attractive when we are paid so that we breathe this substance in the laboratory.

Several experiments showed that when childless women breathe oxytocin through their nose, they also intensify the reaction to children's faces and infant signals like screaming and laughter compared to women who inhaled the placebo [3] . And the FMRT-sons made after the inhalation of oxytocin showed that some areas of the brain of childless women involved, for example, in empathy, begin to work in the same way as in mothers.

But wait a second. Before anyone is too happy to see this “smoking pistol”-this “maternal molecule”, as one scientist called Oxytocin in a conversation with me-know: the other respected laboratory, also part of the New York University and located very close to the previous one, is studying the effect of a completely different neuromedic: a hormon Dopamine, which, like oxytocin, is also produced in the mother’s body.

Other laboratories are interested in the long -term exposure to the behavior of progesterone, estrogen and other by -products of the annoying paternal placenta, which during pregnancy are connected in a precisely certain proportion in order to prepare the mother's brain for the climax during childbirth.

And, of course, do not forget about prolactin, hormone breastfeeding, and stress hormones.

Yes, artificial streams of oxytocin can launch maternal behavior in the childless females of rodents - but the same can be done by injections of “cocktails” composed of other motherhood molecules. Yes, oxytocin, of course, helps to understand why, if a farmer-reinforced breeder wants a sheep to take an alien lamb to him, he often has to manually perform vaginal-luminous stimulation that imitates the influx of “hormones of love” during childbirth. (I was very afraid that that night I had to do this on the farm).

But there is, for example, I. I gave birth not in a natural way, and something I do not recall any pleasant influx of oxytocin at the moment when the surgeons cut my stomach. Sheep breeders who were ready to use their hand, too, was not nearby. Nevertheless, I still adore my children.

It may seem that the reprogramming of the female rat, not to mention the lady who sits next to you and pulls Om-m-m-m-m-mm in the Baby Yoga lesson, is a rather difficult matter. All these neurochemicals interact with each other, but how exactly - we still do not understand. For example, estrogen enhances the expression of oxytocin receptors in different parts of the brain. In addition, “oxytocin and dopamine remuneration systems are different systems, but they communicate with each other,” says Lane Strathirn, who studies maternal behavior at the University of Aiova. “The centers of the reward in the brain are directly connected to the cells that produce oxytocin.”

And after all neurochemicals activate the brain and start the work of its most diverse departments, new connections are formed and old ones die, and various brain structures begin to change physiologically.

This plasticity is a key feature of the mother’s brain. Like much more in our lives - children's nipples, Barbie dolls - mother's brain, it seems sometimes made of rubber. Thanks to these new connections, to squeeze your wrinkled baby as pleasant as there is the most amazing dessert - although you used to treat the babies quite indifferently. Thoughts and sensations generated by our new purpose have been holding on for many years, and possibly remain with us forever - even after hormonal abundance during childbirth and breastfeeding remain in the distant past. (If you can remember them at all. Read more about the removal of memories from the maternal brain I will tell you later - unless, of course, I remember this).

[1] In the countries of Western Europe, the USA and Australia, this is the name of a scientist who has recently received a degree of PhD and undergoing advanced training in the form of scientific research. - approx. scientific. Ed.

[2] Bianca J. Marlin et al., OxyTocin Enables Maternal Behavior by Balance Cortical Inhibition. Nature 520 (2015): 499–504.

[3] Sarah KC Holtfrerich et al., Endogenous Testosterone and Exogenous OxyTocin Influence the Response to Schema in the Female Bran. Scientific Reports 8, No. 7672 (May 16, 2018); Madelon Me Riem et al., Oxytocin Modulates Amygdala, Insula, and Inferior Frontal Gyrus Responses to Infant Crying: a Randomized Controlled Trit. Biological Psychiatry 70, No. 3 (Aug. 1, 2011): 291–97; Helena JV Rutherford et al., Intranasal OxyTocin and Theral Correlaces of Infant Face Processing in Non-Parent Women. Biological PSYCHOLOGY 129 (Oct. 2017): 45–48.