Thursday, May 12, 2016

"Pregnancy Brain"

Every once in a while it’s good to check in with reality. Today’s check-in involves the dread maternal instinct. It ought to be obvious to everyone who is not wearing ideological blinders that mothers have a maternal instinct. Human infants would probably not survive if their mothers did not know instinctively how to care for them.

If this is true, then, in the matter of mothering children, men and women are not interchangeable. Obviously, this will have an impact on how women make decisions about how much time they spend bringing up children and how much time they spend on the job. And it might even have an impact on how well pregnant women or new mothers can do their jobs.

Today’s synopsis of the research, by Prof. Laura Glynn, comes to us from the Scientific American. Since we are dealing with science, the information does not require extensive analysis or interpretation.

About 80 percent of new mothers report difficulties remembering things that once came naturally, and although not all studies support this, the weight of the evidence shows that during pregnancy, women exhibit measurable declines in important cognitive skills.

And also,

A 2010 study found that in the first few months after giving birth, human females show changes in several key brain regions. Specifically, they often exhibit increased volume in the hypothalamus, striatum and amygdala—areas essential for emotional regulation and parental motivation—as well as in regions governing decision making and protective instincts.

We can glean further evidence from behavioral changes during pregnancy. Many women exhibit blunted physiological and psychological responses to stress, which may afford mother and fetus protection from the potentially adverse effects of taxing situations. And in the postpartum period, the hormones that sustain breast-feeding maintain these dampened stress responses.

Pregnant women are also better at recognizing fear, anger and disgust. This enhanced ability to identify and discriminate among emotions may help mothers to ensure their infants' survival. Research from my laboratory has shown that the hormone exposures in pregnancy—for example, high levels of estrogens and oxytocin—are associated with heightened maternal responsiveness and sensitivity to the environment and infants' needs.

We are well past the time when people should have gotten over the notion that these biological changes are trivialities and that gender, not to say motherhood is a social construct. You do believe in science, don't you?

3 comments:

  1. http://thetab.com/us/oregon/2016/05/11/milo-yiannopoulos-2-362
    http://heatst.com/culture-wars/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-feminism/
    http://heatst.com/culture-wars/camille-paglia-free-speech-modern-campus-protest/

    Just a few commentaries that demonstrate how feminism as it is currently practiced is being challenged and will ultimately destroy itself. As they say, "Don't mess with mother nature?" She comes to reside in your house when you least expect her company.
    Interesting that all radical groups get to the point where they have to become the totalitarians that they once railed agains't. This even to the point of attacking free speech that once had value to them. I would suggest as the lack of scholarship, reason and logic begin to fail for them the more they have to descend to an emotional appeal not based on anything close to science and terms that have no real meaning.
    The world has not changed so much that the reason we have two genders does not have a real impact on the survival of the family, the town, the city, the state, the nation and ultimately the world. Emil men exits and they are not going to be conquered by love.
    I have often wondered if this existence is not a learning experience where we are meant to be challenged by or failure just repeats itself? When one looks at history it all appears to be the same challenges repeated over and over again. Even those issues that we address seem ultimately to be taken over by radicals who destroy every bit of progress we have made. Is not the lesson learned from all the racial healing that has happened since Obama's election? Select the issue and the results are the same. makes one wonder if this is not one of the levels in HELL we have to get past?

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  2. Saw a quote yesterday, can't find where today, that I had not even thought about, to paraphrase the best I can remember, "isn't it hypocritical, that feminists, who believe that gender is just a social construct, belie that belief by constantly attacking males."

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  3. We are an idiot people... over-pleasured, over-entertained, over-informed. The idea we need scientific studies to validate something a bunch of Sumerian people could've told us (with a quizzical look) is patently ridiculous. Scientific American will next break the news that we are bipedal, and that being bipedal has consequences for our physiology. And in the next issue they will celebrate transgenders as supposedly natural. We simply overthink things into madness, and a football racquet comes out the other end, and we turn ourselves into pretzels trying to find a use for it. That's how this kind of stupidity comes into being.

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