Bigger love, bigger brain

A recent study by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists has found that children whose mothers expressed love and affection from the beginning of their lives have a larger hippocampus. This is the part of the brain involved with memory, stress response and learning.

The hippocampus is involved in grouping together information from short term memory to long ter. It also aids in spatial navigation and ordering. When the body is stressed, this part of the brain releases stress hormones to help deal with it.

“This study validates something that seems to be intuitive, which is just how important nurturing parents are to creating adaptive human beings. I think the public health implications suggest that we should pay more attention to parents’ nurturing, and we should do what we can as a society to foster these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development,” said lead researcher Joan L. Luby, MD, professor child psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Researchers tested children aged 7 to 10 who had previously been part of a depression study. These children were given a gift then told to wait to open it. Their mother was there and the researchers watched how the mom helped the child be patient with support and understanding. The kids brains were scanned. The kids who were identified as having been nurtured and had nurturing moms also had hippocampus 10% larger than the depressed kids.

“This study, to my knowledge, is the first that actually shows an anatomical change in the brain, which really provides validation for the very large body of early childhood development literature that had been highlighting the importance of early parenting and nurturing,” concluded Luby.

Source: MedicalNewsToday, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition

Photo by John Nyboer