Mother wit.(Book Review)

The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter, by Katherine Ellison (Basic, 279 pp., $25)

WITH the arrival of our latest baby, I became the mother of four and have gotten perhaps seven hours of sleep in the past several months (not per night; total). I would like to think that the incredible amount of effort and brain cells that go into mothering would make one smarter, but I'm too tired to tell.

Now, praise God, we have a book to say, yes, motherhood is making us smarter.

Whew!

The book, Katherine Ellison's The Mommy Brain, describes numerous scientific studies--some concluded, some still underway--that suggest that when women become mothers, their brains become bigger and actually work better than they did before.

Ellison discusses these studies at length, and with a sense of humor. In one 1993 study, for example, 100 new mothers "were quizzed through standardized neuropsychological tests" on the day they gave birth; the results showed that the "new moms scored significantly lower" than non-pregnant childless women and fathers of newborns. "To this," the author retorts, "I can only say, 'Duh.' You've just been through probably the scariest and most exhilarating, painful, and tiring hours of your life and you are now looking at your future in its red, yowling face. It's possible that your performance on standardized neuropsychological tests simply isn't a top priority." She notes that the "deficits in verbal and visual recall" were not a problem for the same women a day or two later; not only do moms do all right on these tests, but we go on to succeed at numerous things simultaneously because, frankly, we have no choice.

In this regard, the book is a useful corrective to the sadly prevalent modern impression that moms give up their smarts to become mothers and that the act of mothering makes us stupider every day. Indeed, it's not just the average Joe who thinks this (and says it), but really smart moms ... like Anna Quindlen. Ellison points out that Quindlen made these self-deprecating comments after having several children: "It was as though my ovaries had taken possession of my brain. Less than a year later an infant had taken possession of everything else. My brain no longer worked terribly well, especially when I added to that baby another less than two years later, and a third fairly soon after that." Now, this same Anna Quindlen has been a columnist for Newsweek, written several novels and advice books, and won a Pulitzer Prize for her commentary in the New York Times--"yet for some reason," writes Ellison, "[she] feels obliged to assure readers that motherhood has dulled her intellect."