Convoluted

[beetiger]

(Perhaps this all belongs over in projectmothra, but somehow I wanted it here.)

This is about the time in fetal development, if everything is going normally, that the moth's supposed to be beginning to develop the folds and convolutions typical of the human brain.

In the meantime, I keep feeling more and more scattered and incoherent.There's data out there that says that the human brain shrinks during pregnancy. A news report on NPR this morning said that new research shows that people with untreated serious depression over long periods of time show atrophy of the hippocampus.

And I'm beginning to wonder if this journal's starting to look like something out of "Flowers for Algernon".

Comments

[atroposnomore.livejournal.com]

Those studies alarmed me when I was pregnant.... I was scared I was going to turn into Charlie Gordon too. ;) Does it say whether your brain ever...goes back to normal or not? or whether the shrinking really has any effect on your intelligence? I do feel more scatterbrained since I had the babe, and I've found it harder to concentrate, but my grades haven't suffered. All I can do is hope I haven't become totally dim. -_-

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

The study in question did in fact say your brain went back to normal size a few months postpartum. I can only hope.

There was in fact another study in a fluffy pregnancy 'zine which quoted some work with intelligence testing that showed real (temporary) drops in the IQ of women during pregnancy. I haven't been able to pull up a primary, or even decent secondary, reference on that work, though.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

I'm soooo skeptical of these attempts to apply biological factoids to humanistic issues of daily life -- especially when they're filtered through a story-hungry journalist. :) There are just too many counterpoints which might be missed, and too many individual variances to assume anything practice from them. They just sink too often into the kind of lazy logic that fuels Drug War PSA's... A-ha, but this chemical damages chromosomes! A-ha, we find out 20 years later that milk damages chromosomes under similarly artificial lab conditions! Whoops. Oh, and are oats good for you or not this week? I can't remember. ;)

In the case of the brain-shrinkage study, for instance, my first big question would be how important the changes during pregnancy are compared to non-pregnancy related changes which don't get discussed. Is the cognitive "impairment" greater than, say, that which you get from ordinary job stress? Is it any worse than the mental sluggishless most of us get first thing in the morning? Is it worse than being on allergy medication? Will you get a greater drop in functional IQ four years from now from dealing with a cranky, bouncy Mothra firing peas at you with a spoon? :)

And what parts of the brain shrink? (I hate to sound rapidly Berkeleyan-PC, but this might be one of those areas where gender-biased testing issues might be worth some thought?) Are people consistently losing those (say) 5-10 points of IQ because their verbal skills are impaired? Their math skills? Or are you just going to suffer a barely perceptible loss in your oh-so-vital ability to turn pentominoes upside-down in your head? :)

Sorry if I'm all soapboxy about this, it's not you, it's just fluffy "science" news. :) This is a major issue of interest and you have a LOT of my sympathy. When I first started showing signs of a dysautonomic disorder, the bouts of confusion and attention deficit really upset me, because they struck at the one part of my body I ever felt any pride or confidence in. I wasted a lot of time worrying about whether some core part of me was disappearing -- worrying about whether on some fundamental level I wasn't just a piece of meat, and whether that took my destiny completely out of my hands. I'm finally starting to gain some faith, though, in the resilience and adaptability of the brain...

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

They actually didn't do more than weakly imply any correlation beteen the physical shrinkage and any actual cognitive changes in the primary study. The measure they used was total brain volume (in some before and after patients, I think).

I don't have the primary research on the IQ study, but the basic evaluation was to take a bunch of women who had been previously tested to be at the same IQ, and retest them against each other on some measure or other when some of them were pregnant. The pregnant women scored in a the lowest 5% of their peers. I'm guessing fatigue's a major component on this one.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

I was incoherent, practically, from lack of sleep when nursing, I insisted my brains were leaking out my breasts, and that is why breast fed babies were shown to have higher IQs. Yep.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Not at all.
You sound fine.
Although the nesting panic attack made me giggle because you were acting so typical. But it was reassuring to me to see someone so different than my sister or Malacat acting the same way they did around that time marker. It was a very human thing for me to read and I hope I remember I'm not abnormal if I am ever there too.

[secanth.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's nature's way of telling us to not start any other projects. (grin) As others have said, supposedly it goes back to normal...no doubt because the mother now has to do something that rather resembles herding cats. (Okay, I'm a bit weird this morning...)

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Anecdotally, my mom told me she used to remember phone numbers, dates and addresses really well, and forgot them all after she had me.

Makes a general sort of sense. Oxygen, blood, resources go elsewhere and the brain gets sidelined.

[hakeber.livejournal.com]

Normal. Right. Only once you can get some sleep. Which will be in, oh, about five years, minimum. Keep grandparents and friends handy to take the babe for a hour or so, so you can retain your sanity. Even if it's just so you can take a shower and a nap.

And actually, you can bring this stuff up over on furryparents, as that is what that community is there for.

[genders.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, Charly, you sound cognitively okay to me.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Your user pic has my hair!
Is the model irish?

[genders.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha. No, as Eastern European as they come. It was a good hair day on top of two hours of styling. Thanks for the information on how to pass, though :-D

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Ahh I meant the layers of pure white and dark brown hairs. Gray but not gray.

[genders.livejournal.com]

Wow. You're one of only a very few people that noticed that, even people who look at my hair directly. Most just see the gray, which is nice for garnering senior discounts but not for much else :-D

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Thats 'cus my hair does it too. :D
I've met three others in person, all guys (I'm a goyle). One guy was incan/irish. I'm a western european/meditteranean mutt with irish in the mix. I don't know the other two guy's heritage, but both were obviously anglo-celticish at least a little. So I figured - it must be irish hair?
Mine is just starting to get white enough that the white shows clearly as white in photos. How did the photographer get such lovely capture of the hair texture?

[genders.livejournal.com]

Heh. I had the cheap Wal-Mart digital camera poised on top of the screen. I was actually trying for a less artistic shot of my face, which I ended up having to take in parts. Much to my annoyance, I lost the original of this photo in a hard disk crash shortly after I took it.

And I'm telling you, it was a really good hair day, heh.