How Parenthood Changes the Brain | Jim Kwik & Dr. Sarah McKay

Why do we remember and how do we remember? And memory depends on attention, what information we take in and what information we filter out. And our pregnant brains have been reorganized to focus in on keeping this new little human alive.

Dr. Sarah Mackay, she's a neuroscientist, she's a speaker, she's the founder of Think Brain and the Neuroscience Academy suite of training programs. Sarah is the author of The Women's Brain book. And also her second book, Baby Brain.

But what's really interesting is when we bring these women into the research lab, either during pregnancy or in early motherhood, and apply a range of cognitive tests, we just simply don't pick up any evidence of broad-scale cognitive decline. These women aren't losing their minds. They aren't becoming more forgetful.

Welcome back to the Kwik Brain Podcast. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik of Kwik Learning, where we help people to learn quickly. And I want to thank you for tuning into this episode. We're going to talk about why people, quote unquote, change once they become parents. And so your question for you today is, what happens to our brains when we become parents? If you are a parent, if you have a parent, if you plan to be a parent, if you know a parent, if you employ a parent, it would be a nice way of understanding, you know, as many of you are geeks and nerds, nerd out about the brain and neuroscience. This is a topic that's interest of me personally. This is why I wanted to have this conversation. Many of you know in the beginning of the year, I became a first-time parent, first-time dad. And I think my brain is changing a little bit as well. Could be the sleep deprivation, I don't yet know, but I think we'll get insight today. And our guest is back. This is Dr. Sarah Mackay. She's a neuroscientist, she's a speaker, she's the founder of Think Brain and the Neuroscience Academy. suite of training programs. Sarah is the author of The Women's Brain book and also her second book, Baby Brain, which we're going to be having a discussion about today, the surprising neuroscience of how pregnancy and motherhood sculpt our brains and change our minds for the better. Probably most importantly, Sarah is a mom of 2 teenage boys and a wife and so much more we're going to go into in this conversation. Welcome back to the show, Sarah.

Thank you, Jim, and congratulations on parenthood.

Yeah, I've been wanting to have this conversation. My team also, we have some expected parents on the team or also parents on the team, and everyone wants to just understand people a little bit better as well. I guess all around the world they call it something different. Some people call it baby brain, momnesia, pregnancy brain. Is it real? What's going on?

Yeah, so this is a word that people use, as you said, different words around the world to describe feeling forgetful, lack of attention, the inability to kind of function in the way that you felt that you were cognitively able to before pregnancy or parenthood. And if we look at women, around 4 out of 5 women will put their hands up and say, hey, yes, that's me, I feel that way. But what's really interesting is when we bring these women into the research lab either during pregnancy or in early motherhood and apply a range of cognitive tests we just simply don't pick up any evidence of broad-scale cognitive decline. These women aren't losing their minds, they aren't becoming more forgetful. There is one point when we do, in some women, in some studies that have been done, detect maybe a point score less on a test of perhaps something like verbal memory or numerical reasoning, doing maths equations, and that's in the third trimester of pregnancy. which is we know when the brain is undergoing this significant reorganization. However, other studies have also gone in and looked at that precise moment, that third trimester of pregnancy, and also found cognitive enhancement for other types of skills in there.

Really?

Yeah. So we've got quite a paradox here. We've got the experience of women saying, hey, I— the subjective experience of feeling forgetful, and then the objective lab testing saying, hey, look, we're not really picking anything up. So what's going on in the middle there? And that's essentially what I wanted to write a book about. And also I'll confess, I didn't experience baby brain when I was pregnant or in early motherhood. But I think it's quite important to point out I didn't expect to forget. It wasn't part of my kind of understanding of pregnancy. It wasn't part of my lexicon that I would forget. And certainly as a neuroscientist, when I was told that this was a thing, I just sort of dismissed it. I thought, what would Mother Nature's intention be to make women kind of more stupid during pregnancy and motherhood. And certainly our understanding from the mammalian kingdom is mothers show cognitive enhancement. They get better at doing what they do when they go through pregnancy and motherhood. So I think just to kind of interrogate that paradox there, various researchers have gone in and looked at that. And there's a number of explanations in there. One is it's very much associated with a sense of wellbeing. So women who are more anxious, depressed, sleep deprived, typically report lower wellbeing during, you know, pregnancy or early motherhood are much more likely to rate their memory as poor, even if they sit down and do memory tests and we say, hey, look, your memory's fine. So there's a real kind of a self-perception part of that. Another part is why do we remember and how do we remember? And memory depends on attention, what information we take in and what information we filter out. And our pregnant brains have been reorganized to focus in on keeping this new little human alive and to read their social cues and to understand who they are. So we've really got an enormous shift of attention either when you're pregnant and you've got a baby in your belly or keeping this new little person in your life healthy and safe and alive. So we've got an enormous shift in attention. And if we forget, you know, you forget where you've— the classic where you've put your keys or to check your emails, it's not because you're experiencing some kind of cognitive deficit. It's simply that your attention was focused somewhere far more important. And then thirdly is this concept, and, you know, your wife may be familiar with this, although I hope not, the mental load, the emotional labor of motherhood, whereby women are sort of expected to do it all. We have this dreadful phrase, super mum. If she's a super mum, no one needs to help because she can do it all. And when you're trying to do it all, you can't, I mean, you simply can't. And when you drop the ball, we've kind of been primed as girls and women through our lives that when you've— we've got our brains and then you sort of add in reproductive hormones or reproductive function, that that is synonymous with cognitive decline and emotional instability. So if you aren't really coping, you forget one thing, will you just internalize that and blame your brain? I'll blame baby brain, blame my hormones, when the issue might be social support. It may be that you simply can't do it all because it's a really big— it's an entire new career that you've suddenly been, you know, taken on board. And so that's kind of what I think baby brain's almost like kind of a phrase we use to describe that sensation or that kind of experience of not being able to do what we did before. It's not a cognitive issue, it's a social issue.

So let's unpack that a little bit. So you didn't experience, you know, this phenomenon as you knew it because you weren't maybe exposed to it. In our work, we teach something called a limitless model where, yes, people can learn methods for reading faster or learning languages or giving speeches without notes, remembering names. But I realized that a lot of people don't always do what they know, and common sense is not common practice because you also have to address people's mindset, the set of assumptions and attitudes they have about pregnancy and their expectations, what they believe is possible, what they believe they're capable of, you know, that these kind of invisible scripts that were running that were imprinted on us, which could definitely change our behavior. Those beliefs could change our behavior. So you're saying it's not just neurological, it could be social, environmental, it could be part of just even a compromised lifestyle, not getting enough sleep.

Absolutely. All of those things. And it's important to remember that we're not picking up cognitive dysfunction in women. And if we look at the animals of the animal kingdom, as I said, they don't read books on what to expect when they're expecting. So a predator will get better at hunting because, you know, there's a biological mandate for that mother to be able to hunt animals to, you know, provide food and sustenance for her young. If you've got herding animals, the way that they detect their young is through smell, is through olfaction. And there, they show an enormous degree of plasticity in the olfactory part of their brain such that they are able to almost instantly recognize their little lamb. A sheep can instantly recognize their little lamb in a herd by smell only versus the 100 other lambs that were born that day. A little animal that needs to scurry around and find where the hidden nuts and seeds are gets much, much better at navigating and can, you know, find their way through a maze better if they were in a research lab. So what we see is these kind of ecologically relevant improvements in cognitive skills and behaviours. And we see the same in humans.

Interesting.

So when a baby is born, it can't use its words to tell you what it needs, can it? It's got kind of a couple of social cues that it uses. It's got its cuteness, its cute little It's an unbelievable smell. You just kind of want to go and grab a little bit and pick it up and, you know, interact with it because it's so cute. So you're drawn to that baby. And we've also got a baby— what else does it do to let you know it's not feeling very happy? It cries. And we see these significant changes taking place in birthing parents' brain, having experienced the hormones and whatnot of pregnancy, is that our brains become tuned into reading the social cues of babies. We see significant structural reorganisation in brain networks involved with empathy, with theory of mind. And also interestingly, we haven't seen this structurally in humans, but we do in other mammals and we've seen it in terms of recording brainwaves via EEG, we see changes in the auditory cortex. So being able to perceive babies' cries. and make meaning of them. And that's why new mothers, particularly breastfeeding mothers, sometimes feel like they wake up before the baby cries. The baby, you're sound asleep, the baby just probably went, meh, that little noise they make before they cry, and you're instantly awake. And then the baby starts crying 10 seconds later. That's because our brains have been completely reorganized and primed. They're in the state of plasticity, particularly in early parenthood, to— tune in to this new little human and read their social cues. So we see considerable enhancement of these skills in new mothers. Yet whenever we talk about mothers and brains, we just focus in on deficits instead of, you know, can we have a strengths-based conversation instead? Let's look at, you know, Mother Nature's intention was for us to form this little, you know, dyad.

Mm-hmm.

With this new little human and interact with them. And the changes that take place in our pregnant brain ensure that. Doesn't always happen. It's still a learning curve.

Sure.

But that's why humans are alloparenting mammals. We share care. We learn from others. We've learned from our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and sisters and other people around us how to respond to that baby. Second baby comes along, you've kind of gone through that learning process. It's a little bit easier next, next time around.

Hi, this is Jim Kwik, author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Limitless. And today I am thrilled to share with you some exciting news. It is Limitless Expanded. It's an updated and brand new edition of my transformative guide. And now it's enriched with new insights and new tools to help you navigate our post-pandemic world. For a limited time, when you preorder your copy of Limitless Expanded, you're going to get exclusive free access to my 13-day Quick Start 2.0 training. It's a brain training plus a bunch of amazing bonuses. Just go to limitlessbook.com and pick up a copy for you and pick up a copy for a friend. So if Mother Nature wants us to be able to survive and be able to reproduce. Is pregnancy preparing a woman's mind for motherhood?

Yeah, essentially that's what we see. We see the changes that take place, particularly in these social brain networks, but also in brain networks involved with rewards. So, you know, even if a baby's crying, you still want to go and pick it up and give it a cuddle. You know, it could be tormenting you, causing sleep deprivation. Normally you wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with that little human. So our reward networks are also changed. And we now understand that a significant degree of these changes take place during pregnancy, primed by the hormones of pregnancy. So yeah, I like to think pregnancy isn't just preparing our bodies to nurture the baby, to give birth and then perhaps choose to breastfeed that baby once it's born, but it's preparing our minds and our brains for focusing in and interacting with that little baby and keeping it alive. Responding to its cuteness and cries.

Have you done research about male brains? Like what's going on with the father's brain?

Yeah.

You know, during this process of pregnancy and birth and raising a child? Just out of curiosity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fathers are curious creatures because they could be there for conception only and never be seen again, or they could perhaps be the primary caregiver when it comes to humans. The first study that was done was by some Spanish neuroscientists. And like credit must go to them. And this is why it took— I think it took so long for these research studies to sort of come about. There were these women in their 30s chatting like women in their 30s do, haven't had babies yet. Hey, you know, I'm thinking of having a baby. And because they were neuroscientists working in a brain imaging lab said, well, what will happen to our brains when we become pregnant and decided to do a study on that because it had never been done up until that point. What these women cleverly did was they got women who'd never been pregnant, scanned their brains before and after that first pregnancy. And they also— these were all heterosexual couples and they scanned the male partners, the fathers of those babies' brains before and after their partner's pregnancy. And that was interesting. They saw the significant changes in the mothers. Compared to the mothers, the brains of the fathers didn't change at all. However, when they've gone in and looked, zoomed in and looked at the men only and gathered a few more data points in, This is the power of numbers. They see some interesting changes in the male brain structurally. Some brains sort of slightly shrunk in some regions of cortex a teeny bit, others didn't change at all, and others expanded a bit. So it kind of averaged out at zero really. But what was important was that the degree of change that was seen in the males' brains was dose-dependent. And that was dose-dependent in terms of how engaged they were or I hate the term hands-on dad, but how engaged they were with the act of fatherhood. So like anything, the brain responds and changes the more you engage in an activity. If you're wanting to learn golf, you get out there and you practice golf and your brain will respond accordingly. So the same happens in the male brains. What I think is really interesting, that the more significant and reliable change that we're able to see in fathers the biology of fathers, and some men find this a little bit confronting, is that we see quite significant drops in levels of testosterone in men when they become fathers. But again, that's dose-dependent. It's driven by engaging with the baby. So, you know, we haven't got mum, dad, baby. We've got these little mammalian sort of ecosystems. We're like this— our families are like a little, you know, mammalian ecosystem where our biology is— entwined and interacting. And we don't know why testosterone drops when men engage with babies, but one idea out there is that what does a high T guy do with high levels of testosterone? He wants to kind of go out into the world and hunt and gather and, you know, perhaps find another woman to have more babies with. A guy who's interacting with a baby and his testosterone's lower, is much more likely to kind of engage with the baby and help share the care. And it's again, this might be Mother Nature's kind of evolutionary mandate to kind of ensure that babies are cared for by as many able, loving adults as possible. So all of our biology changes when we interact with these little babies and it really changes in ways to ensure the survival of the baby and the care of the baby. So, you know, we weren't meant to parent alone. Humans are alloparenting mammals, which means we're meant to share parental care amongst all of the adults kind of in that family. And our biology changes.

So Sarah, what would your advice be to a woman, maybe even a man who's planning to get pregnant or they are pregnant or maybe new parents with regards to what they're experiencing right now? If they were listening right now, obviously there's some kind of interest because they've listened to this episode. What would your advice be?

There's a couple of things. The first is really this idea that, you know, Mother Nature didn't intend us to parent alone and sharing care, whether that be tag teaming at nighttime, whether that being joining a mother's group. We're so fortunate here in Australia, mother's groups are almost mandated. You leave the the maternity ward and the local community nurse comes around and assigns you to a community mothers group. The more we can understand the importance of kind of having other adults around us to support, to support the mother, to support the family. You know, mother helpers in days gone by, you know, helped care for the baby, helped hunt and gather food, you know, helped provide emotional support and really importantly taught us how to care for our babies. So there's that aspect. And there was one other piece of research that kind of emerged that really surprised me that I wasn't aware of, and that's particularly in women, but we also see this in fathers. Particularly with our first baby, we go into this real sort of state of hypervigilance. And that's actually quite useful and important because again, we want to keep our baby alive and we want to kind of be alert to any threats. So we are in a state of hypervigilance and that naturally should tail off By about 5, 6, 7 weeks postnatally. If that sort of state of hypervigilance persists, it can turn into what we would call anxiety, can turn into a clinical condition that can sort of start to interfere with daily life. But to understand that the first sort of month or 2, you are in a state of hypervigilance and how that manifests in many, many mothers and also some fathers as these catastrophic intrusive thoughts It's about something terrible happening to the baby. I remember being convinced my baby was going to fall out of a window or down the stairs and I was too scared to carry him into a room and I could only stand in the middle of the room, not go near a window. I couldn't go out on the balcony of my apartment building. I was convinced some terrible thing was going to happen to the baby or I was going to hurt him in some way. And that's really, really normal. We don't often talk about that. And that's the kind of the meaning our minds are making of this state of hypervigilance that we find ourselves in. And I sometimes think when we understand how normal that is, that normalizes the feelings that we have and it depathologizes them and it decatastrophizes them. If it persists for a couple of months, then you've got to reach out and get help because it could turn into a mental health issue. But to understand, particularly for first babies, that's quite normal. And again, Mother Nature's just sort of ensuring you're focusing in on keeping your Dr.

Sarah Mackay, the name of the book is Baby Brains: The Surprising Neuroscience of How Pregnancy and Motherhood Sculpt Our Brains and Change Our Minds for the Better. Dr. Sarah, where can people get their copy of the book? Yeah.

So, well, if you're in Australia, it's in all good bookshops. If you're outside of Australia, you'll be able to grab a copy on Amazon. It's available as, you know, an ebook globally. download onto Kindle or whatever your ebook is. And there is also an Audible version that you can listen.

And how do people connect with you?

My website's the best. That'll feed you off into social media or my books or courses, et cetera. So drsarahmackay.com. And I also spend most of my time on social media on Instagram. Again, Dr. Sarah Mackay.

Well, make sure you follow her there. As always, we'll put it on a list of Links to the books, to our website, social media, and so much more at jimkwik.com/notes. I want to encourage everybody to make sure you subscribe, especially on our YouTube where we have over 1 million brainiacs, if you will, that get the latest content. We put more than just episodes there. We also put the extended version of our show that goes beyond 20 minutes as well. I encourage you also to make sure you, if you haven't already, To make sure you take your, your brain animal quiz, the quiz we developed for cognitive types, which could help you also become, you know, more empowered parent. And that's at mybrainanimal.com. It's absolutely free and you get a detailed personalized report on how to apply it towards learning, leadership, and so much more. Dr. Sarah, thank you so much again for being on our show.

Thanks, Jim.

All right, everybody. I look forward to seeing you next episode. Until then, be limitless.

Limitless.