You will always be attached to you mother

The relationship goes both ways. Children also have measurable effects on their mothers, meaning that the next time your mom asks when you’re coming home, you can technically say that you’re always with her (but you should probably visit too). Below are some of the ways we’re attached to our biological mothers and how they’re attached to us. Of course, there are many beautiful ways to be a mother outside of having a biological relationship; unfortunately, there aren’t enough studies yet on the families that you get to choose.

When you go to a grocery with your mom, somehow you can always hear her yelling for you to grab some dip from across the store. There’s no explanation for that yet, but scientists do know that children uniquely respond to the sound of their mother’s voice. Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine showed that children’s brains are more engaged when their hear their mother’s voice and that the sound of her voice activates very specific parts of their brains.

Looking at a baby may give you far less pleasure than looking at a puppy now, but that likely will change if you ever have your own child. In a  study on mice published in Nature, a team of researchers showed that the “love hormone” oxytocin flips the brain into a maternal state.

The study is based on the fact that, on both sides of the mouse auditory cortex, there are oxytocin receptors and oxytocin-producing neurons. The team hypothesized that these receptors and their proximity to the hearing system could explain why mice — and human mothers — quickly respond to the sounds of their children. Injecting oxytocin into the left auditory cortex of female mice who’d never had children immediately caused them to respond to the calls of baby mice. The surge of oxytocin seemed to transform their behavior and their interpretation to social cues, which the scientists think also applies to happens to new human mothers, whose brains also get flooded with the chemical.

In another rodent study, scientists showed that maternal fear responses could be passed down to their children just by limited exposure to the fear stimuli. The 2014 paper, published in PNAS, showed that scents alone can pass fear onto newborns. In the experiment, female rats were first conditioned using electric shocks to fear the smell of peppermint. Then, the rats were impregnated. When the pups were born, they too were exposed to the peppermint smell but were not given a shock. Nevertheless, the pups were still afraid when exposed to peppermint, even when their mother wasn’t present. This may explain why, in humans, PTSD and certain phobias can sometimes be passed down from mothers to children.

A 2015 study from researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that our brains are not only activated by the sound of our mother’s voices but also actually grow because of it. Twenty premature babies, who had spent more time in an incubator than with their moms, were studied as the sound of their mother’s voice and heartbeat were pumped into the incubators with tiny speakers. The babies, each born between eight to 15 weeks early, listened to these recordings three times a day for 30 days, while a control group of another 20 didn’t get the private DJ session.

inverse.com