A woman's brain changes in profound ways after she gives birth, new study shows

Along with the arrival of a new human being into the world, pregnancy also seems to result in something else life-changing -- a woman's brain that's differently wired. Just what sort of'different' is less clear, but apparently some pretty notable changes take hold after a woman gives birth, according to a study published Monday in Nature Neuroscience. It reports that, after pregnancy, women's brains hold less gray matter in certain areas of the brain, particularly those regions dealing with things like social cognition and theory of mind, or knowing what's going on inside someone else's mind, as explained by Scientific American. The changes are thought to last for at least two years after birth. Led by neuroscientist Elseline Hoekzema of Leiden University, a research team at the Autonomous University of Barcelona carried out the study by looking at brain scans of 25 first-time mothers, from both before and after pregnancy, as well as the brain scans of 20 women with no children.