2023-05-14 11:00:00
A grandmother’s brain is different. Everyone who has been lucky enough to grow up with a loving grandmother knows it. Or at least that is what a study now comes to corroborate The neural correlates of grandmaternal caregivingpublished a few years ago in the magazine Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the first of its kind focused on analyzing the brain activity of grandmothers when they see their grandchildren.
“What really stands out in the data is the activation of brain areas associated with emotional empathy“, Explain James Rilling, professor of anthropology at Emory University and lead author of the study. “This suggests that grandmothers are oriented to feel what their grandchildren feel when they interact with them. If your grandson is smiling, he is feeling the child’s joy, but if your grandson is crying, he is feeling his pain and anguish,” he adds.
What really stands out is the activation of the brain areas associated with emotional empathy. This suggests that grandmothers are oriented to feel what their grandchildren feel when they interact with them.
But is it the normal response of a human being towards their descendants? Everything seems to indicate that no, that the nuances are remarkable. Thus, unlike what happens with grandchildren, the study found that when grandmothers were shown images of their adult children, they showed stronger activation in the area of the brain associated with cognitive empathy.. “That indicates that they may be cognitively trying to understand what their adult child is thinking or feeling, and why, but not so much emotionally,” Rilling adds.
“I personally identify with this research because I spent a lot of time interacting with my two grandmothers,” he says for his part. Minwoo Lee, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University and a co-author of the study. “I still fondly remember the moments I spent with them. They were always tremendously welcoming and always happy to see me, but when I was a kid I didn’t understand why,” adds Lee, who thinks it’s relatively rare for scientists to study the human brain in old age for more than just the problems associated with it. to dementia or other disorders of aging.
The grandmother hypothesis: more than a second mother
human beings are cooperative creators, This means that mothers receive help to care for their offspring, although the sources of that help may vary to varying degrees both between and within societies.
“Here, we highlight the brain functions of grandmothers that may play an important role in our social lives and development,” Lee continues. “This is a truly important aspect of the human experience that has been largely neglected in the field of neuroscience.”
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Rilling’s lab focuses on the neural basis of social cognition and behavior in humans. The scientist, who is also a pioneer in research on the less-explored neuroscience of parenthood, explains that, for example, motherhood has been widely studied by other neuroscientists. In this sense, it was possible to suppose that the brain of the grandmothers, as mothers that they have been, functioned to a certain extent like that of these second ones. What the researcher and his team discovered, however, is that the interaction of grandmothers with their grandchildren offered new unexplored neural territory.
“Evidence is emerging in neuroscience for a global parenting system in the brain,” Rilling says. “We wanted to see how the grandmothers would fit into that pattern.” “We often assume that fathers are the most important caregivers of children alongside mothers, but this is not always true,” she continues, “since, in some cases, grandmothers are the main helpers.”
The so-called grandmother hypothesis posits that human females tend to live well beyond their reproductive years because they provide evolutionary benefits to their offspring and grandchildren.
In fact, the call grandmother hypothesis he postulates that the reason human females tend to live well past their reproductive years is because they provide evolutionary benefits to their offspring and grandchildren.
Evidence supporting this hypothesis includes a study of the ancestral tribe of the Hadza of Tanzania, where the search for food by grandmothers improves the nutritional status of their grandchildren. Another study of traditional communities showed that the presence of grandmothers decreases the intervals between births of their daughters and increases the number of grandchildren. And in more modern societies, the authors are continually finding that engaged grandmothers positively relate to children who performed better on variables measured such as academic, social, behavioral, and physical aptitude.
What happens inside a grandmother’s brain?
In the current study, the researchers wanted to understand what was going on inside the brains of healthy grandmothers and how this might relate to the benefits they provide to their families. To do this, the 50 participating grandmothers in the study completed questionnaires about their experiences as grandmothers, providing details about how and how much time they spent with their grandchildren, the activities they did together, and how much affection they felt towards them. They also underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while being exposed to photographs in order to measure their brain function while viewing images of their grandson, unknown children, the grandson’s parents, or unknown adults.
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The results showed that when viewing images of their grandchildren, most of the participants showed more activity in brain areas involved with emotional empathy and movement, compared to viewing other images. Subsequently, after a personal interview, the researchers also verified that the grandmothers who showed greater activity in the brain areas related to cognitive empathy when seeing pictures of their grandchildren reported that they wanted to be more involved in their upbringing.
Similarly, the main challenge that many of them highlight is trying not to interfere when they disagree with parents about how their grandchildren should be raised and what values they should instill in them. “In addition, many grandmothers also agreed on the great advantage of not having the financial pressures or time constraints that they generally experienced when raising their children,” says the researcher. “The vast majority of those surveyed enjoy the experience of being a grandmother much more than that of being a mother.”
“The vast majority of those surveyed enjoy the experience of being a grandmother much more than that of being a mother.”
Finally, compared to the results of an earlier study from Rilling’s own lab in which parents were shown photos of their children, grandmothers on average showed greater brain activity in regions involved in emotional empathy and motivation. looking at the photos of his grandchildren.
“Our results add to the evidence that there appears to be a global parenting system hardwired into the brain, and that grandmothers’ responses to their grandchildren correspond to it.”, says Rilling, for whom personally interviewing all the participants “was tremendously fun and rewarding.” “I wanted to get an idea of the rewards and challenges of being a grandmother,” she adds, while venturing that in the future it seems interesting to also look at the neuroscience that is locked in the brain of grandparents and how the brain functions of grandparents can differ between cultures.
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