Janak Jalil

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211 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 4 Mar

Janak Jalil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Global News Podcast · US Congress receives classified briefing on war with Iran · 4 Mar 2026 podcast

Pregnancy changes so many things, almost every part of the body, but little is known about how it changes the brain.

To learn more, Spanish scientists have scanned the brains of 127 women before, during and after pregnancy.

I travelled to Madrid to meet Professor Susana Carmona, one of the researchers leading the study.

Women's brains change profoundly during pregnancy.

Those changes are dynamic.

What we have done is to have a lot of subjects so we can compute and have statistics and numbers about this change.

Susanna showed me the brain scans.

So what I'm looking at here, you've got the grey matter outlined in red.

She'd highlighted areas of grey matter, a nerve-rich layer that plays a crucial role in things like processing information, emotions and empathy.

So we can calculate different things, such as, for instance, cortical thickness, grey matter volume or surface area.

When her team put the average results together and compared them to scans of women who weren't pregnant, a striking pattern emerged.

For women who weren't pregnant, their grey matter stayed pretty steady over time.

But for women who were pregnant, their grey matter decreased by about 5% during pregnancy, before gradually coming back up, though not fully, six months after giving birth.

I know it sounds like a bad thing, but it does not necessarily need to be a bad thing.

As in the brain, as in life, sometimes less is better.

We usually use the metaphor of a tree in which you have a lot of branches and you start pruning some of the branches so the tree can grow up through the main one, the more important ones.

There's still a lot to be worked out at a more detailed cellular level.

But Professor Carmona's theory, backed by years of animal research, is that these changes represent a restructuring of the brain's architecture as it adapts to the demands of motherhood.

And scientists found that the more the brains changed on the scans, the more likely the women were to report on questionnaires that they felt content and well-bonded with their babies.

What I would like to make clear is that we are not saying that you need to be pregnant to be a good mother.

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