The Last Candle

The Neurologica blog, a logic- and neuroscience-oriented blog written by neurologist Dr. Steven Novella — who is also the host of the excellent Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast — recently posted a commentary on a new brain behavior-related study: What’s in a smile? Maternal brain responses to infant facial cues. The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Pediatrics, concludes:

When first-time mothers see their own infant’s face, an extensive brain network seems to be activated, wherein affective and cognitive information may be integrated and directed toward motor/behavioral outputs. Dopaminergic reward-related brain regions are activated specifically in response to happy, but not sad, infant faces. Understanding how a mother responds uniquely to her own infant, when smiling or crying, may be the first step in understanding the neural basis of mother-infant attachment.

Dopaminergic. Hmm, yes, indeed. Hmm.

As a preface to the meat of Dr. Novella’s post, he begins with some sentiments as a parent that personally identify with the study:

I have two daughters, about to turn nine and six. They are, in my completely subjective and biased assessment, the most adorable things in the universe. They evoke in me a powerful and complex set of emotions – an experience that every parent understands and no non-parent can truly appreciate.

I forwarded the same Pediatrics study to my friend Jill, an actual mother (unlike the neurologist fellow). Jill did respond with her thoughts; kindly, she permitted me to reprint some of her comments here:

I can’t even explain how I feel when she smiles – I don’t think any bad mood could stand up against it. When she cries though, the feeling is almost animalistic – I can’t ignore her cries. I feel absolutely compelled so stop the crying and Anthony, while he doesn’t enjoy hearing her cry, has a completely different response.

A later email on the same topic offered further insight:

I recently visited with Anthony’s sister Jen and she has a little one who was born about 5 weeks after Eden. While we were there both babies were put down for a nap and at one point Jen’s little guy woke up and not only did I not react but I didn’t even hear him but when Eden started to cry I heard her right away even though she was further away from me than Kyle.

Science and neuroscience has tens or hundreds of years of research before the deep recesses of the human mind are well understood, but hearing about the personal experiences of Jill and Dr. Novella is at least as interesting and maybe more important — after all, these maternal and paternal attractions (well, the maternal attractions, at least) are exactly the kind of phenomena the study references. I can’t think of an appropriate word for how great the existence of those phenomena is, but it is great.

But yeah, the studies help. Now we just need a literature to establish a good theory…

Update, later: Comments for the new science topic don’t work, and I don’t care enough to try and fix them. The more incentives I have to move to Wordpress, the worse I feel bad about procrastinating about the move to Wordpress. So there.