![](/static/253f0d9b/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/913b482d-9012-449f-bc87-b1f4463e7154.jpeg)
From the article:
Squeezed in alongside their main projects, the investigation took eight years and included dozens of participants. The results, published in 2016, were revelatory [1]. Two to three months after giving birth, multiple regions of the cerebral cortex were, on average, 2% smaller than before conception. And most of them remained smaller two years later. Although shrinkage might evoke the idea of a deficit, the team showed that the degree of cortical reduction predicted the strength of a mother’s attachment to her infant, and proposed that pregnancy prepares the brain for parenthood.
I think those are all good questions that I don’t think anyone really have conclusive answers to (yet). Hopefully the researchers will have the funds in the future to investigate those and more!