Ah, oxytocin, how we love you. Or how you make us love others. Or something. But that's not all. Oxytocin, the hormone associated with social relationships, including maternal-infant bonding, lust, and trust, now has a different kind of role to add to its resume:
Science blogger Ed Yong explains that apparently the flush of oxytocin that is released when a fetus's head starts pushing on the inside of the cervix in labor sends a "chill-out" message to the newborn brain, causing it to not respond for a while to the neurotransmitter known as GABA, which pre- and post-birth usually keeps all those nerve cells firing away at rapid pace, learning and growing.
My first reaction to this was wonder if this was a way of softening the psychological drama of leaving the warm, soft, wet womb and its constant heartbeat and heading out into this big bad world.
That may be a side effect, but the researchers seem to think it's a little more pragmatic than that: When a baby brain is all zen on oxytocin, it needs a lot less oxygen, which means it's at much less risk of damage from a temporary oxygen deprivation, one of the most common dangers of birth. Handy.
It's cool to know your hormones are that on the ball. It also seems like oxytocin is powerful enough on so many fronts that even if you do need to plan a c-section for some reason you might want to wait until labor starts to give you and your kid that hormone hit. (Waiting for labor, as I learned from my friend who recently insisted on it, is apparently exceedingly rare. Perhaps that's a post for another time.)
In the meantime, I wonder if large enough doses of oxytocin would chill out my brain for a while?
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