There was an interesting article in the Health section of this morning's paper. It stated that research was showing that becoming a mother caused permanent changes in a woman's brain. The study was done on rats (more later) and showed that mother rats became more adept at finding food and better at remembering things like where they left their pups. They then talked about how human mothers are able to pick out their own child's crying from several crying babies. It stated that men do not experience such a change. What jumped out at me was the fact that they compared virgin rats with LACTATING rats. Then the results were extrapolated to be applicable to all mothers. One has to wonder to what extent it was the lactating as opposed to simply having given birth. Did rats whose pups were stillborn or removed from mother show the same changes and to the same extent? I would like to see such a study done with both lactating and non-lactating mother rats. I suspect, however that (insert sarcastic tone of voice here) depriving the pups of their mother's milk or depriving the mother of the full cycle of reproduction might be considered cruelty to animals. Winnie *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html