Pregnancy and the Brain: Why the Second Time Is Different
Freya Wardell
In a previous blog (How Pregnancy Reshapes the Brain: A Groundbreaking Study), we explored one of the first studies to map the brain across an entire pregnancy. That research followed a single participant in extraordinary detail, revealing widespread reductions in grey matter and cortical thickness alongside increases in white matter integrity as pregnancy progressed. Importantly, that study established a key idea: pregnancy does not damage the brain; it reshapes it in ways that likely...