Dr. Darby Saxbe

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745 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Dr. Darby Saxbe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Modern Wisdom · The Painful Psychological Cost Of Becoming A Dad - Darby Saxbe - #1129 · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

You'd be bathing them.

So you'd be doing the kind of intensive care that helps you really get to know a baby and attunes you more to their physiology and to their mind.

Because where we see a lot of the change happening in men's brains is in what we call the mentalizing network.

And that's a part of the brain that activates when we think about other people's minds and their intentions.

It's what reads other people's emotions.

And you could think about it as the seat of our empathy.

And so that is a dynamic part of the brain in new dads and also in new moms.

In part because when you are having to care for an infant who cannot communicate effectively, right, because they can't talk, they just cry, you have to be able to read their emotions and you have to be able to problem solve to figure out what they need.

So you're getting a lot of exercise to that empathetic part of the brain.

Well, no, because I actually think you have to problem solve quite a bit.

So your executive functioning is also going to attune.

No, moms, both dads and moms.

So it's tuning up.

Well, it depends on whether you think of losing gray matter volume as a tune up or a tune down.

And the jury's a little out on that.

We see volume reduction, which we think is about pruning and becoming more efficient.

Well, our short-term memory for objects that aren't our baby.

So there's some evidence that working memory gets compromised, but we often use this deficit framing when we talk about mommy brain, like, oh, I forgot where I parked the car.

It actually looks like certain kinds of memory are enhanced.

And it's salience driven.

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