This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher and D'Ajata.

Pregnancy brings big physical changes to a woman's body,

but what three neuroscientists were more interested in was, what does it do to a woman's

brain?

We were, like on our 30s, we were thinking, I would like to have a baby, but look at this,

look at this.

Susanna Carmona, a neuroscientist at the University of Carlos the 3rd in Madrid.

And then we realize that most of these data come from animal studies and that there were no solid study

about what really happens to your brain when you get

pregnant.

And that is how we convinced the boss that we should do that even without any founding

at this point.

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.

They 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 either,

whether they were new fathers or not.

Shrinking sounds bad though.

Why would you want less gray matter?

But Carmona says less does not result in deficits in thinking or memory, and it might actually be the results of a good thing,

...