Darby Saxbe

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

You want like an efficient brain.

And the parts of the brain that seem to shrink are the social cognition regions.

which are linked with empathy, responsive caregiving.

So that sort of supports the theory that it's not like a deficit model, something isn't getting taken away, but it's rather this adaptive plasticity.

Yeah, exactly.

So as men are spending more time with babies, we see more gray matter volume decrease.

So it was the men in our study who said they wanted to take more time off after birth.

They were spending more day-to-day time with infants.

They told us they enjoyed interacting more with infants.

They had stronger bonding with the babies even before birth.

And then they had stronger bonding after birth.

Those were the dads that seemed to show the greatest changes, like the greatest reductions in gray matter volume.

So those dads looked the most like...

previous studies that have focused on moms transitioning to parenthood.

As men engage in parenthood, they're kind of building this parenting brain.

I know.

Yeah.

We often think of the brain as like this fixed organ, but it is reshaped by our social experiences.