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

So it's memory for your baby's smells, objects that are pertinent to your baby.

You know, rodents have to figure out where they've stashed their babies, like in a nest full of bedding.

So one reason the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that we think of as implicated in memory, is also really sensitive to smell, is you kind of have to smell your way to find the baby to retrieve your pup.

So the hippocampus is really plastic in new moms and new dads.

So it's like our memory is actually getting a different kind of workout, but we're maybe losing our sharpness in some domains and improving our functioning in others.

Exactly.

And it's also about value, right?

It's what domains are we motivated to optimize?

So a lot of people find both moms and dads that after they have kids, they care a little bit less about achieving at work, right?

Which is not to say that moms and dads are bad workers.

If anything, I actually think they make great contributions to organizations because of all the skills they develop.

Right.

But priorities shift.

And at least in the short term.

Although the good news is that it appears that having become a parent is neuroprotective in late life.

So there's some work coming out of the UK Biobank, which is this big repository of scan studies from middle-aged and older adults that finds that when you've had more children, you actually have better cognitive functioning and brains that look younger.

So it's

If you use a machine learning algorithm to try to figure out how old is the brain compared to its chronological age, people who've had more kids up to a certain point, it tops off at around three kids, actually have brains that the machine learning algorithm codes as younger.

So I think it's about social integration.

So the fact that it shows up in dads as well as moms tells me it's not just pregnancy hormones.

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