14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists have recently revealed that being a mother, or exhibiting motherly behavior, boosts the number of neurons in the rat brain. The finding could also be applicable to humans, seeing how rats are considered to be a very close model to our own brains for this type of research. The investigators learned that even female rats that had never given birth before experienced the neural boost, but only after they started exhibiting maternal behaviors, LiveScience reports.
In the experiments, rats that had no offspring of their own were exposed to a number a newborn rats each. Over a period of time, the adults started exhibiting maternal behavior, such as keeping the offspring group together, guiding it back to shelter and other similar actions. The researchers note that, as soon as this type of behavior set in, the brains of rats showed an increase in maternal neurons. This is not the first paper to investigate this issue, but its designers say that it is a premiere, in that it is the first to look at animals that had no offspring of their own.
In previous research, it was demonstrated that a lot of species tended to exhibit the same type of behavior. When animals are pregnant or lactating, they tend to also exhibit the neuronal boost, the experts say, which makes them a lot more likely to show a positive behavior towards their own offspring, or to those of others in the species. This holds true for creatures such as mice, hamsters, monkeys and even humans, the team behind the new work says. The experts are based at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.
At this point, the experts are in the dark as to what is causing these increased numbers of maternal neurons to form. They say that the hormone prolactin could play a part, or that the exposure to the pups themselves may be the trigger. During the investigation, the Tufts team looked at an area of the brain known as the subventricular region, whose neurons were believed to be playing an important part in smell recognition and even in the recognition of the young.
“Where do these new cells migrate to within the brain and what do they do? Do they affect how a female subsequently perceives her young through recognition of baby odors?” Tufts researcher Robert Bridges asks. He reveals that the work was carried out under a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant. Details of the findings appear in the December 16 issue of the scientific journal Brain Research Bulletin.