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

[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.