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Science and technology: Neuroscience: Brain mater
科技：神經(jīng)科學(xué)：腦膜
Scanning reveals what pregnancy does to a mother’s brain.
掃描揭示了懷孕對(duì)母親大腦的影響。
As any parent will tell you, once you have had children nothing is ever quite the same.
正如所有家長(zhǎng)會(huì)告訴你的那樣，一旦你有了孩子，一切都變得不一樣了。
Including, it seems, their mothers’ brains.
似乎母親的大腦也會(huì)發(fā)生變化。
In a paper just published in Nature Neuroscience, a team led by Elseline Hoekzema of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, in Spain,
《自然-神經(jīng)科學(xué)》雜志剛剛發(fā)表的一篇論文中，由Elseline Hoekzema帶領(lǐng)的西班牙巴塞羅那自治大學(xué)的團(tuán)隊(duì)，
describe for the first time how pregnancy alters women’s brains, rewiring them in ways that persist long after a child has been born.
首次描述了直到寶寶出生以后很久的一段時(shí)間內(nèi)，懷孕是如何改變及重塑女性大腦的。
Dr Hoekzema and her colleagues performed detailed brain scans on 65 female volunteers, none of whom had been pregnant before, but hoped to be in the near future, and a further 20 who had no such desire.
Hoekzema博士和她的同事對(duì)65名女性志愿者進(jìn)行詳細(xì)的腦部掃描，這65名志愿者目前都沒(méi)有受孕但都有近期懷孕的打算，另外還掃描了20位沒(méi)有受孕打算的志愿者。
About 15 months later, by which time 25 of their volunteers had carried babies to term, they repeated the process.
大約15個(gè)月后又對(duì)已懷孕的25名志愿者進(jìn)行了腦部掃描。
Comparing the scans showed significant reductions in the volume of grey matter in the brains of the new mothers.
對(duì)比這些腦部掃描發(fā)現(xiàn)孕婦灰質(zhì)體積明顯減少。
(Grey matter contains the main bodies of nerve cells; white matter, the brain’s other component, consists mostly of the nerve fibresthat link those cells together.)
（灰質(zhì)內(nèi)包含神經(jīng)細(xì)胞的主體；白質(zhì)指大腦的其他構(gòu)成成分，主要由連接神經(jīng)細(xì)胞的神經(jīng)纖維構(gòu)成。）
The effect was reliable enough that it could be used by itself to predict, with perfect accuracy, which of the women had been pregnant and which had not.
這一影響可以非常準(zhǔn)確可靠地預(yù)測(cè)女性是否懷孕。
And it was persistent, too. When the researchers retested the mothers two years later, most of the alterations were still present.
并且這一影響比較持久，2年后研究人員對(duì)這些母親進(jìn)行了重新測(cè)試發(fā)現(xiàn)大多數(shù)孕期改變?nèi)匀淮嬖凇?/div>
DrHoekzema and her colleagues suspected that something in the biological process of pregnancy itself was causing the changes.
Hoekzema博士和她的同事們懷疑是懷孕的生物化過(guò)程引發(fā)了這些變化。
To double-check, and to make sure that the experience of preparing for parenthood was not the true culprit, they also compared their women’s brains with those of some men—both fathers and those without children.
為了復(fù)核并確保孕前準(zhǔn)備并不是真正原因，他們還將這些女性的大腦與一些已為人父和尚未生育的男性進(jìn)行了比較。
The men’s brains, like those of the childless women, showed no such pattern of changes.
這些男性的大腦同為受孕的女性一樣，都沒(méi)有這類變化。
And the results fit with studies on animals.
這個(gè)結(jié)果與動(dòng)物實(shí)驗(yàn)的結(jié)果相吻合。
Rats that have had pups, for instance, show notable and lasting changes in brain structure.
例如有幼崽的白鼠的大腦結(jié)構(gòu)發(fā)生了顯著而持久的變化。
They also tend to be less anxious, better able to cope with stress, and to have better memory than their pupless contemporaries.
與未受孕的白鼠相比，它們有焦慮度低，抗壓力強(qiáng)，記憶力更好的傾向。
英文文本來(lái)自經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)人 譯文來(lái)自欄目二第五組
