The Single-Parented Brain
The Single-Parented Brain
This is a study on animals, not humans, but it seems likely that we'll soon have evidence from MRIs and other tools to measure what it means to the brain to be the child of a single parent or a family that breaks up.
Shirley S. Wang writes in the WSJ about small rodents called degus, related to guinea pigs and chinchillas, and research by German biologist Anna Katharina Braun and her colleagues on what happens when they remove Daddy. An excerpt:
Their preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents.In a study the researchers presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago earlier this month and recently published in the journal Neuroscience, half the degus were raised with two parents, while the others were raised by a single mother, the father having been removed from the cage one day after the birth of his offspring.
Dr. Braun and her colleagues found that in the two-parent families, the degu mothers and fathers cared for their pups in similar ways, including sleeping next to or crouching over them, licking and grooming them, and playing with them. The fathers even exhibited a "nursing-type" position.
When the mother was a single parent, the frequency of her interactions with her pups didn't change much, which means that those pups experienced significantly less touching and interaction than those with two parents.
The researchers then looked at the neurons--cells that send and receive messages between the brain and the body--of some pups at day 21, around the time they were weaned from their mothers, and others at day 90, which is considered adulthood for the species.
Neurons have branches, known as dendrites, that conduct electrical signals received from other nerve cells to the body, or trunk, of the neuron. The leaves of the dendrites are protrusions called dendritic spines that receive messages and serve as the contact between neurons.
Dr. Braun's group found that at 21 days, the fatherless animals had less dense dendritic spines compared to animals raised by both parents, though they "caught up" by day 90. However, the length of some types of dendrites was significantly shorter in some parts of the brain, even in adulthood, in fatherless animals.
"It just shows that parents are leaving footprints on the brain of their kids," says Dr. Braun, 54 years old.
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