Primates are an order that contains monkeys, apes, humans, and prosimians,
which are things like lemurs.
Okay, we also have to talk about ancient hominy,
or more commonly, but less accurately named hominids.
Okay, so that’s modern people and our ancient ancestors, australopithecines,
Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals.
So primates have helpless babies.
Ancient hominids had even more helpless babies,
and modern humans have completely useless babies.
(audience laughing)
We don't often stop to think about it,
but the degree of helplessness is pretty profound compared to other animals.
They can't even lift their head for weeks.
Some scientists have theorized that humans are born very early
in our gestational development,
and that if we were born at comparable stages to other primates,
human gestation or pregnancy would last 18 to 21 months.
(audience laughing)
Being pregnant with a toddler.
(audience laughing)
Yeah.
So people have suggested that the more helpless human babies became,
the more complex the human brain had to become in order to help them survive.
In fact, the helpless human infant is thought to be behind human pair bonding,
father provisioning, low reproductive output, late reproductive onset,
and even menopause, which is almost unique to humans.
Did you know that?
Also killer whales for some reason.
(audience laughing)
In most species, reproductive function ceases near death,
but in humans we have something called the grandmother effect,
which is that if there's a grandmother around,
grandchildren are more likely to survive, and there may be even more born.
Now let's talk about a species of monkey called the Japanese macaque.
Harriet Smith describes them in a book called, “Parenting for Primates.”
There’s a group that lives in a park with hot springs, and they love to dive in.
What park staff noticed was that primiparous,
or monkeys who had their first baby,
would often jump into the hot springs with their infant on their back,
and the babies would drown.
Which is really sad,
but that almost never happened to the more experienced moms.
Maternal experience led to awareness of danger,
which led to increased survival of offspring.
Nancy Nicholson studied all of bamboo mothers,
and what she found was that 43%
43% of infants of first time moms died in the first six months of life.
It’s almost half.
This is compared to 6% of more experienced mothers.
You can find similar studies for rhesus, howler and squirrel monkeys.
Now it's hard to get definitive evidence on evolutionary medicine.
For obvious reasons.
Ancient hominids are no longer around.
And they didn’t leave much material culture for us to study.
But I'd like you to picture, if you will, a Homo erectus mother.
She lived about a million years ago in Africa or West Asia.
She stood about five feet tall.
She had a heavy brow ridge.
She could make fire and art.
Unclear how much she could speak.
Let's picture this mom has just had a baby.
She needs to accomplish a task in a river.
She wades in, but because she needs her hands,
she goes to sit the baby on a rock in the middle of the river.
But as she does so, unlike the Japanese macaque, she is a sudden, intrusive image
of the baby being swept off the rock down stream.
She pauses, eyes widened, pupils dilated
and goes to take the baby to a safer place ashore.
Whose children are going to survive, more commonly to pass on genes.
Those whose mothers had intrusive images of danger,
or those like the Japanese macaque who had to learn from experience.
What I can say for certain is that humans have really complex brains,
and that something really complex happens to your brain when you have a baby.
After practicing medicine for a few years,
I can also tell you there's a lot we still don't know.
We don't understand exactly why pre-eclampsia happens.
We don't really know what an instinct is.
And there is a vast black hole of information around pregnancy,
delivery and the postpartum period.
Let’s talk about postpartum depression.
No primate in the history of time has ever parented as alone as
the modern human woman.
Primates, ancient hominids, modern hunter gatherers,
all parent very much in groups with lots of social support built in.
We don’t know why exactly postpartum depression happens,
but some scientists have theorized it may serve as a rallying cry,
a way to build support around a mother baby dyad from the community.
Others have suggested it may be a way to decrease energy expenditure in
a time when caloric needs are high.
Regardless, I think it's time we reframe the brain changes of motherhood.
Is it possible that instead of being pathologic?
They may have been the very key to human survival.
In which case they should be celebrated.
When you have a baby, you get superpowers.
Here's another fun example.
The reticular activating system is a collection of neurons in
the brainstem about the size of a pencil.
It’s a very old part of the brain.
One of the things it does is direct your attention.
It decides what is important enough to rise to the level
of your conscious attention.
This is why some people can live next to a train track,
and eventually won’t hear the train go by anymore.
It’s because the reticular activating system decides,
oh, that’s not important. Let her sleep.
The reticular activating system in moms is acutely attuned from birth.
to any sound their baby makes
or the absence of sound.
Have you ever woken up because it was too quiet?
In a room full of mothers and sleeping babies, if you can imagine,
eventually, a mom will wake only to her own baby’s cry.
There are likely many other examples we can find
when we look at these things from a multidisciplinary perspective.
So how can we change?
Number one.
What if we educated pregnant moms all about the ways
their bodies and brains will change to protect their child?
There is evidence that the context in which harming intrusions occurs
makes a difference to the level of distress that they cause.
So if you think you’re on the way to postpartum psychosis,
it’s pretty distressing.
If you think of them as a gift from lizard mom, it’s less upsetting.
We can make this experience ess distressing with education.
Number two. If postpartum depression is a call to the community,
then let's find ways to bring the community back in.
This may mean we have to radically change the way we think
and our habits and structures around delivery in the postpartum period.
Number three, we need to demand and fund more research on women’s health.
(audience applauding)
Call your legislator. Ask them to direct the NIH to put more money that way.
But lastly, and most importantly, in my opinion,
we need to change the way we think and talk about these things.
Thanks
(presenter and audience laughing)
Mom brain is not something bad.
It may be the very reason you and I are sitting here today.
Lizard mom deserves some respect.
Thanks.
(audience cheering and applauding)
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