2018年经济学人 “一孕傻三年”有科学依据(1)（在线收听）

Science and technology: Neuroscience: Brain mater

科技：神经科学：脑膜

Scanning reveals what pregnancy does to a mother’s brain.

扫描揭示了怀孕对母亲大脑的影响。

As any parent will tell you, once you have had children nothing is ever quite the same.

正如所有家长会告诉你的那样，一旦你有了孩子，一切都变得不一样了。

Including, it seems, their mothers’ brains.

似乎母亲的大脑也会发生变化。

In a paper just published in Nature Neuroscience, a team led by Elseline Hoekzema of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, in Spain,

《自然-神经科学》杂志刚刚发表的一篇论文中，由Elseline Hoekzema带领的西班牙巴塞罗那自治大学的团队，

describe for the first time how pregnancy alters women’s brains, rewiring them in ways that persist long after a child has been born.

首次描述了直到宝宝出生以后很久的一段时间内，怀孕是如何改变及重塑女性大脑的。

Dr Hoekzema and her colleagues performed detailed brain scans on 65 female volunteers, none of whom had been pregnant before, but hoped to be in the near future, and a further 20 who had no such desire.

Hoekzema博士和她的同事对65名女性志愿者进行详细的脑部扫描，这65名志愿者目前都没有受孕但都有近期怀孕的打算，另外还扫描了20位没有受孕打算的志愿者。

About 15 months later, by which time 25 of their volunteers had carried babies to term, they repeated the process.

大约15个月后又对已怀孕的25名志愿者进行了脑部扫描。

Comparing the scans showed significant reductions in the volume of grey matter in the brains of the new mothers.

对比这些脑部扫描发现孕妇灰质体积明显减少。

(Grey matter contains the main bodies of nerve cells; white matter, the brain’s other component, consists mostly of the nerve fibresthat link those cells together.)

（灰质内包含神经细胞的主体；白质指大脑的其他构成成分，主要由连接神经细胞的神经纤维构成。）

The effect was reliable enough that it could be used by itself to predict, with perfect accuracy, which of the women had been pregnant and which had not.

这一影响可以非常准确可靠地预测女性是否怀孕。

And it was persistent, too. When the researchers retested the mothers two years later, most of the alterations were still present.

并且这一影响比较持久，2年后研究人员对这些母亲进行了重新测试发现大多数孕期改变仍然存在。

DrHoekzema and her colleagues suspected that something in the biological process of pregnancy itself was causing the changes.

Hoekzema博士和她的同事们怀疑是怀孕的生物化过程引发了这些变化。

To double-check, and to make sure that the experience of preparing for parenthood was not the true culprit, they also compared their women’s brains with those of some men—both fathers and those without children.

为了复核并确保孕前准备并不是真正原因，他们还将这些女性的大脑与一些已为人父和尚未生育的男性进行了比较。

The men’s brains, like those of the childless women, showed no such pattern of changes.

这些男性的大脑同为受孕的女性一样，都没有这类变化。

And the results fit with studies on animals.

这个结果与动物实验的结果相吻合。

Rats that have had pups, for instance, show notable and lasting changes in brain structure.

例如有幼崽的白鼠的大脑结构发生了显著而持久的变化。

They also tend to be less anxious, better able to cope with stress, and to have better memory than their pupless contemporaries.

与未受孕的白鼠相比，它们有焦虑度低，抗压力强，记忆力更好的倾向。