WIKIMEDIA, IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS COLLECTIONAnyone who has snuggled a clean, new baby probably also noticed the child’s distinctive, pleasing smell. In a study published this month (September 5) in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that the brains of new mothers are more responsive to this scent than the brains of women who are not mothers.
Scientists from Germany, Canada, Sweden, and the U.S. recruited both women who had never had a baby and women who had recently become mothers (three to six weeks prior to enrollment). They also collected cotton undershirts worn by newborns unfamiliar to the women during the babies’ stay at a Dresden nursery . The researchers passed clean air over the undershirts and delivered that air to the adult participants’ nostrils, studying their responses via fMRI. All of the women ranked the odors’ familiarity, pleasantness, and intensity comparably, and their brains responded to the scents in the same regions: the putamen, and the dorsal and medial caudate nuclei. But the new mothers’ brains showed significantly increased neuronal activation in those areas compared with the nulliparous participants, suggesting ...
