一孕傻三年是真的吗？ Pregnancy brings big physical changes to a woman's body. But what three neuroscientists were more interested in was, what does it do to the woman’s brain? "We were in our 30s, and we were thinking I'd like to have a baby, but look at this, look at this." Susana Carmona, a neuroscientist at the University of Carlos the Third in Madrid.怀孕会给女人的身体带来很大的生理变化。但三位神经科学家更感兴趣的是，它对女性的大脑有什么影响?“我们都30多岁了，都在想我考虑生小孩，但看看这个。”马德里第三大学的神经学家苏珊娜·卡莫纳说。"And then we realized most of this data came from animal studies. And that there were no solid studies about what really happens to your brain when you get pregnant. And that's how we convinced the boss we should do that even without any funding at this point."“然后我们意识到这些数据大多来自于对动物的研究。也没有可靠的研究表明，怀孕时大脑会发生什么变化。这就是我们说服负责人，即使现在没有任何资金，也应该进行研究的方法。”Carmona and her team took MRI scans of 25 women's brains, before and after their first child. They found that parts of the brain dealing with social cognition actually shrunk—reduced in volume—in women who successfully conceived and had kids. That's compared to no changes among control women, and no changes in men—whether they were new fathers or not.卡莫纳和她的团队对25位女性孕前以及生完第一胎之后的大脑进行了核磁共振扫描。他们发现，那些成功受孕并生下孩子的女性，大脑中处理社会认知的部分的确萎缩了——体积变小了。与之相比，控制组（没怀孕）的女性没有任何变化，男性也没有变化——无论他们是否是新晋升为父亲。Shrinking sounds bad though: why would you want less grey matter? But Carmona says less does not result in deficits in thinking or memory, and might actually be the result of a good thing: the fine-tuning of connections between neurons. "When you have a lot of routes that arrive to a different place, and there's one that is the shorter and the faster one, the optimal thing would be to close the rest so you never get lost, from point A to point B."大脑萎缩听起来很糟糕：为什么灰质会减少呢？但卡莫纳说，灰质减少可能不会引起思维迟钝，或记忆力减退，实际上可能是一件好事的结果：神经元细胞连接的微调。“当你有很多条路线到达一个不同的地方，而有一条是更短更快捷的，最理想的方案是关闭其余路线，这样从a点到b点你就不会迷路。”Hormonal fluxes cause similar fine-tuning in the adolescent brain—and hormones might be the culprit for these changes as well. Changes that can last at least two years after pregnancy. The study is in the journal Nature Neuroscience.荷尔蒙的通量会导致青少年的大脑发生类似的微调——荷尔蒙可能也是孕妇大脑发生变化的罪魁祸首。这些变化在怀孕后至少会持续两年。这项研究发表在《自然神经科学》杂志上。The effect of all this? Could be a boost in maternal attachment. Fewer hostile feelings towards the baby, and more pleasure playing together. As for Carmona and her two colleagues? They decided not to wait til the study was complete to start their families. "We decided that whatever happens to your brain, we wanted to be mothers."这一切的影响是什么？可能会促进母体依恋。少了对宝宝的敌意，多了与宝宝一起玩耍的乐趣。那么对卡莫纳和其他两位同事呢？她们决定不等到研究完成后再开始生孩子。“无论怀孕对让大脑发生何种变化，我们都渴望成为母亲”。