Can Motherhood Make You Smarter?

It was not too long ago that the I.Q. test was a routinely administered exercise in elementary and secondary schools. At that time (late seventies and early eighties), schools placed great faith in these magic numbers. Flag those above 125 and those below 90, teachers were told. And we did, dutifully assigning enrichment or remedial programs accordingly.

Those were the years when we worked within a narrow understanding of the brain's potential. Content dictated everything from test scores to curriculum because the model of the brain we worked from defined intelligence as an innate capacity determined mainly by genetics. If the environment had some impact on intelligence, it did so in a minor capacity. You were either smart or you weren't; and the label the test scores assigned each student was considered unimpeachable.

Thanks to a body of new research that surfaced within the last 30 years, school systems have dispensed with using the I.Q. test as mandatory assessment of a child's potential. This new research reveals that the brain, like the cells in our body, is malleable and changeable. Intelligence is not an inborn, determined number or capacity; in fact, intelligence is created by the brain's response to events in the environment.

In short, you MAKE your intelligence. New experiences create new neural pathways in the brain. Each time the brain confronts a new event, it responds by creating new synaptic connections; in fact, all thinking processes are such connections and the more synapses are formed, the stronger and more capable the brain is rewired to metabolize new information.

Even an experience like pregnancy can rewire the brain and make it more intelligent. In contrast to the long held myth that pregnant women and young mothers lost not only their identities but their intelligence, new research suggests otherwise. In one study, a group of pregnant women were asked to assess their mental acuity in areas such as focus and memory. A significant number of these women identified themselves as "weaker" in these areas even though tests performed on their mental ability showed the reverse.

Why would these women see themselves as "weaker" when in fact they were not? Researchers suggest that most women have internalized the myth that being pregnant, staying home with the kids (being barefoot and pregnant) decrease mental and intellectual strength.

In her book, "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood makes us Smarter" (2005), Katherine Ellison, who delayed motherhood until she turned 37, for fear that her intellectual life would be doomed by pregnancy, examines the changes that maternity brings to the brain. Her book explodes the myth that the maternal brain is a fuzzy one. Ellison presents several new research studies that have gone against the long-held belief that professional women act against their own intellectual interests by staying home with the kids.

Neuroscientists have found that during pregnancy, rats experienced a tremendous sprouting of new dendritic spines the parts of neurons that reach out to form synapses. They found that soon after birth, female rats' cognitive ability intensifies so much that nursing mother rats can locate and catch prey 3 times as quickly as virgin rats. In essence, neural pathways in the brains of mother rats have been remapped and rewired by the experience of pregnancy and motherhood.