The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (21 page)

Cuddling skin-to-skin with her infant tweaks the mother’s physiological responses too. Her stress levels dip (as measured by the cortisol in her saliva), her mood lifts, and her heart rate stabilizes. Her milk production increases, which is one reason why her baby is quicker to put on much needed weight than a baby in an incubator.
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If the baby is born too early and is placed in the neonatal intensive care unit right after birth—an anxiety-provoking experience for all concerned—kangaroo care in the hospital can also solidify the new relationship between a mother and her baby.

What made the biggest impression on me when reading this research was that holding their fragile babies in this skin-to-skin embrace reduced signs of postpartum depression in new mothers. The mothers in the kangaroo care group touched and looked at their babies more and their babies were more likely to return their gaze. Their synchrony became a fact through physical contact. And that early synchrony had a positive influence on the child’s motor and verbal skills months later.
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PARENTS’ BRAINS GET A BOOST

If proof were needed that social and physical contact can build neural networks in children, this was it. And the baby’s brain isn’t the only beneficiary; adults can also generate new neurons from
close contact with their newborns. In the 1990s, studies showed that a mother rat’s interaction with her young pups improved her learning and memory, and in the first decade of the 2000s, neuroscientists wondered whether that might be true of human mothers too. Now evidence is growing that supports that hunch.
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One study by researchers at Yale and Bar Ilan Universities shows that interacting with her new baby substantially increases the gray matter in a woman’s prefrontal cortex (the planning and problem-solving areas of the brain), the parietal lobes (the navigational portions), and the midbrain, including those areas linked to memory, emotion, reward, and coordinated movement.
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An infant’s scent seems to flip certain neural switches in the parents. The mother’s sense of smell gets completely rewired during pregnancy, so that the scent of her own infant becomes incredibly alluring. In the meantime, though, because the olfactory infrastructure is being overhauled, other wonderful aromas may smell disgusting. When I was pregnant, the scent of freshly ground coffee, which ordinarily makes me swoon, made my stomach roil. Neuroscientists think that the redo of the pregnant mother’s olfactory system is what drives her mysterious food cravings and aversions. Not only does her sense of smell get revamped but a prospective mother’s hypothalamus gets a tune-up, ensuring that the right hormone cocktail is released so that she feels
truly excellent
when close to her baby. During pregnancy, the volume of gray matter in her midbrain, parietal lobes, and prefrontal cortex ramps up too, so that after the baby is born the mother nearly always perceives her child in a positive light.
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Though mothers have a head start, thanks to their enhanced oxytocin pathways, new fathers are not left out of the neural renovation plans, at least in studies involving animals. Right after his pups are born, new brain cells sprout in the male mouse’s olfactory bulb—but only if he sticks around. If he skips town, the neural boost to his sense of smell just doesn’t happen. As a result, he is
unlikely to recognize and remember the sounds and smells of his own baby, a prerequisite for mice as well as for men.

Without close proximity to his infant, a father’s brain cells may take a hit, according to the work of two neuroscientists, Gloria Mak and Samuel Weiss. Though they work with mice, not humans, they’ve discovered that for any neural changes to take place in the fathers’ brains, they have to be in close physical proximity to their offspring; simply seeing their babies isn’t enough. When the neuroscientists allowed the dads to nuzzle their pups, the fathers’ brains formed new networks. But when the new fathers could only sniff them through a mesh screen, nothing happened. Neurogenesis depended on real interaction.
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THE CUTE EFFECT

This contact-driven brain boost is no accident. Human babies have evolved over ten thousand generations to draw out solicitous care and feelings of intense pleasure in the adults around them, especially those who share their genes. Their oversized heads, rounded foreheads, huge eyes, button noses, rosebud mouths, and sweet scent make them irresistible to almost anyone with a pulse. Like all mammals, they’re cutest when they’re the most dependent. In 1950 the German ethologist Konrad Lorenz wrote that the appearance of immature animals creates an “innate releasing mechanism” on contact that switches on an adult’s interest, affection, and nurturing.

Primatologist Robert Sapolsky calls this response the Cute Effect. When we see small babies, our usual defenses often melt away. Even when we see baby rats and mice, we engage in admiring high-pitched baby talk, which would sound ridiculous if not for the fact that everyone, everywhere, does it (in Japan, this predictable reaction to cute things even has a name:
kawaii
). Mammalian biology primes us to feel excited, tenderly protective, and even acquisitive (as in
I want one of those
) when we see these universal cuteness signals—a state of arousal exploited by the designers of
Hello Kitty, Bambi, Pokemon, and even Alessi, the Italian designer of kitchen “cutensils.”

Walt Disney had the Cute Effect in mind when his animators transformed the long-snouted, sadistic Mickey Mouse of
Steamboat Willie
(1928) into a harmless munchkin in his 1953 film
The Simple Things
, according to the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Where Steamboat Willie plays an absurdist “Turkey in the Straw” on sentient instruments—he cranks a goat’s tail, tweaks a pig’s nipples, plays a cow’s teeth like a piano, and uses her udder as bagpipes—twenty-five years later, right after Lorenz’s paper was published, the newly cute Mickey “cannot even subdue a squirting clam.”
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In creating a helpless, toddler-like Mickey (complete with a huge head, eyes, and ears, and sagging trousers to metaphorically accommodate a diaper), Disney was banking that our protective impulses would be tweaked, even if Mickey is a rodent.

If cuteness turns on tender feelings in all of us, it’s because we’re biologically prepared to react that way. In fact, several recent experiments show that the Cute Effect doesn’t just alter our feelings, it improves certain abilities too. If they saw pictures of cute baby animals first, people were then much more careful when carrying out a fine motor task (they had to use tweezers to pick up tiny objects from tight spaces). Pictures of adult animals had no such effect. Several Japanese scientists took this idea one step further. Having replicated the tweezer study, they found that looking at cute baby animals also enhanced speed, perception, and performance on a test that had nothing to do with taking care of something. Seeing something cute helped people focus, and thus improved their performance.
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With these results in mind, the authors of the study suggest that babies—or pictures of babies—be used to improve our performance behind the wheel, at the office, or anywhere narrow focus is required. Imagine on-site infant contact rooms in the workplace, explicitly designed to enhance productivity—a questionable idea, to say the least.

Strategically deploying the Cute Effect is not unique to humans. Infants are so attractive to adult primates that male Barbary macaques in the wild hold and cuddle infant macaques as a way of bonding with other males in the troop. “When a Barbary macaque male encounters another male with an infant, a bizarre ritual takes place,” according to German ethologist Julia Fischer. “The males sit together, embrace each other, then they hold up the infant and nuzzle it. Their teeth chatter and lips smack while making low frequency grumbling noises.” When Fischer and her colleagues did a social network analysis, mapping out who was interacting with whom in the troop, they discovered that the males who carried newborn infants had significantly stronger relationships with other males, compared to males who were more likely to carry around, say, pieces of wood. Carrying these newborn infants was not merely a status symbol, it was a type of social glue. The baby helped these males start conversations with other members of their troop and drew them closer together.
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In three species of New World monkeys—marmosets, squirrel monkeys, and spider monkeys—the number of infants who survive can be predicted by how many non-paternal males carry the infants around.
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This may be a matter of new mothers exploiting their male social ties for protection. When their babies get slightly older, though, it is the mother’s female friends that count. Over decades of studying baboons in the Okavango Delta in Botswana and in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, Joan Silk and her fellow primatologists discovered that female baboons with the strongest bonds with other females—not just with their female relatives but also with female “friends”—were the most likely to have offspring who survived into adulthood.
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THE ONE-TWO PUNCH OF ADVERSITY

In
The Sexual Paradox
, I explored why lovingly looking after their babies ignites the reward centers in mothers’ brains, in the
process making the mothers smarter. Mothers who deploy problem-solving skills in order to feed and protect their babies are more likely to have offspring who survive—at least long enough to pass on this astute solicitousness to their own offspring. It’s a Darwinian thing. Whatever parents do to increase their children’s chances also launches the genes promoting that selfsame behavior into the future. That’s how face-to-face contact between mother and baby has become a hidden cognitive self-improvement program for both parties. But what happens if bad luck throws a monkey wrench into the works? What happens if war, illness, or deprivation gets between mother and baby? Does a parent’s hard life affect the traits they pass on to their children? The answer to that question is a qualified yes.

One of the displays in Antwerp’s quaint Maagdenhuis Museum is a model of a discreet wooden drawer that was installed in the stately building’s masonry wall when it was a Catholic girls’ orphanage and
vondelingenhuis
, or “foundling house.” In the 1500s needy mothers would deposit their baby girls, usually dressed in their best outfits, in this street-side hatch under cover of night. Lowering the wooden hatch automatically sounded a bell inside the building. Within minutes the orphanage staff would have pulled open the baby drawer on the other side of the wall. The baby would then live there as she grew from infancy to toddlerhood and into childhood and adolescence, fed daily with warm gruel served in little white and blue faience bowls and taught by the nuns to read, embroider, and do housework.

The Maagdenhuis and the vondelingenhuis next door were just two of hundreds of religious buildings featuring such drawers or “foundling wheels,” often made out of half a beer barrel. The wheels had been decreed by Pope Innocent III in the twelfth century so that desperate (read unwed) mothers could leave their babies in the care of the Church instead of drowning them in the
Tiber. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, there was even a foundling wheel in the Vatican.

These babies were rarely unwanted. At the Maagdenhuis, a mother’s intention to reclaim her child was signaled by a token she would leave with the baby: the jagged half of a playing card or picture of a saint that had been torn in two. If the mother returned with her matching half she would be reunited with her child, no matter how much time had elapsed. In one of the most forlorn exhibits I have ever seen, several dozen unclaimed playing-card halves are displayed in the museum, now sandwiched between ATMs and tchotchke boutiques on an upscale street in downtown Antwerp.

Torn foundling token at the Maagdenhuis Museum, Antwerp, Belgium
. (Image and Figure Credits
5.2
)

More than five hundred years later, foundling drawers have made a comeback. Between the years 2000 and 2010, modern foundling wheels—now called baby hatches, angel cradles, or Moses baskets—have resurfaced in Italy, France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, Japan, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, South Africa, Canada, the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. There is even one in Antwerp, though strictly speaking it’s illegal in Belgium to abandon a child. Still, as they did in the twelfth century, frightened or desperate mothers in poor neighborhoods can leave their babies in contraptions that look like library drop-off bins. These days, pulling open the stainless steel drawer reveals a
Plexiglas bassinette, equipped with a heated mattress and a source of oxygen. The baby’s weight on the mattress triggers an alarm that rings in the hospital’s neonatal unit. The baby is retrieved, cared for, and, if unclaimed after several months, placed in foster care.

The common assumption is that these abandoned babies will thrive once caring adults step into the breach. Frankly, any outcome is preferable to starting life in a dumpster. But here’s something to consider: if early interaction between a parent and his or her baby can switch on and off genes linked to that baby’s future, unless the staff who took them in were affectionate and emotionally engaged with their charges, their care might not have been enough to trigger the healthy development of these infants. According to evidence from the nascent field of epigenetics, clusters of genes activated by the parents’ behaviour early on help determine how well a child fares later—how likely he or she will be able to manage stress, for example, or to become a problem drinker or drug user. A parent’s early face-to-face interaction with an infant may well determine whether a genetic predisposition to psychological disorders will skew his life journey or be silenced. Even the child’s lifespan, and that of his future children and grandchildren, can be influenced by the impact of early parenting on his genome. The give-and-take of face-to-face interaction in infancy affects how a child’s genetic programming will play out.