Being pregnant can change your brain matter.

So what does that mean for cognitive function?

You know, we've had millions of years of evolution, and this is probably adaptive in some way,

but we don't necessarily know what way that is adaptive.

It's Wednesday, October 23rd, and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm SciFright producer Dee Petersmith.

Pregnancy is a hugely transformative experience, but there's a big part of those bodily changes that is historically understudied.

And that's what happens in the brain.

There's new research that shows distinctive changes in both

gray matter and white matter in the brain over the course of pregnancy. But there's still lots of

questions that remain to be answered. Here's cipherise Kathleen Davis with more.

Here with me to explain these changes and what they might mean is my guest. Dr. Liz

Krastle, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me, Kathleen.

So this research, it's my understanding, is very near and dear to your heart because it wasn't just any pregnant brain that was being studied. It was yours,

right? Right. I was studying my own brain. So I was working with Emily Jacobs, my collaborator,

and her student, Laura Pritchard, who had just finished a menstrual cycle study, and we were

working on menopause in other ways. But then I was planning a pregnancy. And so he said, hey, we got to do this.

So that's how it sort of started. And we went from there. And it was really exciting to do your

own participant in your own study. And it sounds like this is a really understudied part of

pregnancy research, right? Studying the actual brain. Exactly.

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