Seize the cheese...
The Inner Mommy Rat / How our ratlike behavior benefits us: "Probably best not to talk about rats on national TV,' said Chris Jahnke, the media trainer I consulted last month after my book on mothers' brains started getting publicity.
I couldn't figure out how to avoid it. Rats were what had first hooked me into spending more than two years talking to scientists about the neurobiology of parenting. As a new mom struggling with a new load of mental demands, I'd noticed a report about two researchers who'd found that maternal experience improves rats' memory and learning capacity, enabling them to find hidden Froot Loops more efficiently than nonmoms.
Besides feeling buoyed by evidence that motherhood may enrich instead of devastate your brain, I resonated with that fierce emotion apparently common among mammals, the feeling that says you can no longer waste time: You've got to get back to the nest to feed the pups. In the many months that followed, I became obsessed with all signs of how rats and humans meet in matters closest to the heart.
A virgin rat, for instance, will just as soon eat or bury a newborn as nurture it -- unless that virgin has been accustomed to the presence of pups over time. That was me. It was only after a long weekend spent tending to a good friend's new baby that I was able, at age 37, to contemplate having a child of my own.
Once rats fully engage in mothering activities, scientists have found that sensory input from pups activates their brains' ancient reward circuitry, the same areas that keep us pursuing food and sex. The maternal drive, in fact, may be the strongest reward drive of all: Research shows that rat moms will more eagerly cross an electrified grid to be near their babies than will other rats, deprived of food or sex.
Quite recently, brain scans of humans have found similar neural patterns, shedding light on the mystery of how mothers manage to wake up so often in the middle of the night, ministering to what might seem to more objective eyes a mere fetid, yowling mass of life. Rodents and humans alike become passionate slaves in the service of evolution.
Mother rats also grow more fearless. Rather than hug walls, as rats are prone to do, they will boldly venture into open fields and aggressively fight off predators, much like suburban moms with whom I chanced to compete against while bidding for a house in the Bay Area.
Yet rats, as a group, like some humans, also have a capacity for empathy. When researchers used a harness to suspend a rat in the air, another rat, watching the first one flailing in distress, pressed a bar to lower him back to safety.
The rat-human parallels become more understandable when we consider, as South Carolina neuroscientist Jeffrey Lorberbaum puts it, that "the brain was not reinvented for humans." The basic architecture of rat and human brains is remarkably alike, as are the chemicals coursing through them, swaying our moods and behavior. Because of just these similarities -- plus the general lack of popular sympathy for rats that has made it so easy for researchers to, as they say, "sacrifice" rodents to dissect their brains -- rats have taught us much of what we know about basic human physiology.
In the course of my research, my sympathy for rats sharply increased, as I often caught myself feeling particularly ratlike. A whole subset of scientific studies, for instance, gauges motivation by training rats to press a bar to get a reward. New rat moms, as it has been found, will press the bar most frenetically for the reward of rat pups sliding down a shoot -- something many human mothers can identify with when they recall the smell and sounds of their own babies. With my own kids quickly approaching adolescence, I'm bar-pressing these days for a wider range of rewards. When my book first came out and friends started checking in, I caught myself hitting the enter bar on my computer with startling energy and realized I was bar-pressing for praise.
Many writers know the feeling of living with their subjects day in and day out and gradually starting to behave like them. My book on mothers' brains left me with diagrams of rat brains on my office walls -- plus two pet rats, acquired after my sons caught my enthusiasm. Observing them, it has struck me how much of what's essential in life we have in common: They close their eyes with pleasure when stroked, huddle together for warmth and companionship, and, like those French women who never get fat, savor a variety of nourishment. Yet I finally feared I'd gone overboard with this rat thing after a Washington Post reviewer wrote, "She paws through countless rat studies." (On reading that, my nose twitched with annoyance.)
Like the media trainer, the Post's reviewer hails from the East, where, as my publicist, New Yorker Holly Bemiss, noted, "We may have a different take on rats, because we see them." Over and above that, I understand the popular reluctance to embrace what is ratlike within us.
Our conceit is that we're so utterly unalike: We go to the theater, design rockets, read commercial nonfiction. What ties us together, in fact, are the things we try hardest, with all that other activity, to ignore. We're born. We live. We procreate (or not). We get sick. We die.
As parents, we're obliged, with constant fear and wonder, to face these same hard truths. We see time passing in our children's growing faces and can't then look away from the reality that we, too, are aging. Watching rats teaches and reteaches these same lessons we most need to learn. We're impermanent. Seize the day. Or at least, seize the cheese.
I couldn't figure out how to avoid it. Rats were what had first hooked me into spending more than two years talking to scientists about the neurobiology of parenting. As a new mom struggling with a new load of mental demands, I'd noticed a report about two researchers who'd found that maternal experience improves rats' memory and learning capacity, enabling them to find hidden Froot Loops more efficiently than nonmoms.
Besides feeling buoyed by evidence that motherhood may enrich instead of devastate your brain, I resonated with that fierce emotion apparently common among mammals, the feeling that says you can no longer waste time: You've got to get back to the nest to feed the pups. In the many months that followed, I became obsessed with all signs of how rats and humans meet in matters closest to the heart.
A virgin rat, for instance, will just as soon eat or bury a newborn as nurture it -- unless that virgin has been accustomed to the presence of pups over time. That was me. It was only after a long weekend spent tending to a good friend's new baby that I was able, at age 37, to contemplate having a child of my own.
Once rats fully engage in mothering activities, scientists have found that sensory input from pups activates their brains' ancient reward circuitry, the same areas that keep us pursuing food and sex. The maternal drive, in fact, may be the strongest reward drive of all: Research shows that rat moms will more eagerly cross an electrified grid to be near their babies than will other rats, deprived of food or sex.
Quite recently, brain scans of humans have found similar neural patterns, shedding light on the mystery of how mothers manage to wake up so often in the middle of the night, ministering to what might seem to more objective eyes a mere fetid, yowling mass of life. Rodents and humans alike become passionate slaves in the service of evolution.
Mother rats also grow more fearless. Rather than hug walls, as rats are prone to do, they will boldly venture into open fields and aggressively fight off predators, much like suburban moms with whom I chanced to compete against while bidding for a house in the Bay Area.
Yet rats, as a group, like some humans, also have a capacity for empathy. When researchers used a harness to suspend a rat in the air, another rat, watching the first one flailing in distress, pressed a bar to lower him back to safety.
The rat-human parallels become more understandable when we consider, as South Carolina neuroscientist Jeffrey Lorberbaum puts it, that "the brain was not reinvented for humans." The basic architecture of rat and human brains is remarkably alike, as are the chemicals coursing through them, swaying our moods and behavior. Because of just these similarities -- plus the general lack of popular sympathy for rats that has made it so easy for researchers to, as they say, "sacrifice" rodents to dissect their brains -- rats have taught us much of what we know about basic human physiology.
In the course of my research, my sympathy for rats sharply increased, as I often caught myself feeling particularly ratlike. A whole subset of scientific studies, for instance, gauges motivation by training rats to press a bar to get a reward. New rat moms, as it has been found, will press the bar most frenetically for the reward of rat pups sliding down a shoot -- something many human mothers can identify with when they recall the smell and sounds of their own babies. With my own kids quickly approaching adolescence, I'm bar-pressing these days for a wider range of rewards. When my book first came out and friends started checking in, I caught myself hitting the enter bar on my computer with startling energy and realized I was bar-pressing for praise.
Many writers know the feeling of living with their subjects day in and day out and gradually starting to behave like them. My book on mothers' brains left me with diagrams of rat brains on my office walls -- plus two pet rats, acquired after my sons caught my enthusiasm. Observing them, it has struck me how much of what's essential in life we have in common: They close their eyes with pleasure when stroked, huddle together for warmth and companionship, and, like those French women who never get fat, savor a variety of nourishment. Yet I finally feared I'd gone overboard with this rat thing after a Washington Post reviewer wrote, "She paws through countless rat studies." (On reading that, my nose twitched with annoyance.)
Like the media trainer, the Post's reviewer hails from the East, where, as my publicist, New Yorker Holly Bemiss, noted, "We may have a different take on rats, because we see them." Over and above that, I understand the popular reluctance to embrace what is ratlike within us.
Our conceit is that we're so utterly unalike: We go to the theater, design rockets, read commercial nonfiction. What ties us together, in fact, are the things we try hardest, with all that other activity, to ignore. We're born. We live. We procreate (or not). We get sick. We die.
As parents, we're obliged, with constant fear and wonder, to face these same hard truths. We see time passing in our children's growing faces and can't then look away from the reality that we, too, are aging. Watching rats teaches and reteaches these same lessons we most need to learn. We're impermanent. Seize the day. Or at least, seize the cheese.
posted by Lee at 6:02 AM
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