Recently, my son-in-law introduced me to a friend as follows: She’s an interesting person and she’s a good conversationalist…unless Anne is in the room. In that case, she shouldn’t try. ”
Ann is my infant granddaughter and I am guilty as charged. Something happens when she is with her. She was entranced. She was enchanted. Crazy.
It turns out that this is not just love, although it is a lot. I am experiencing “grandma brain”. It’s not a technical term, but teeth A scientific explanation of what is happening. Neurological research shows that something unique happens in our brains when we see our grandchildren, which may explain our intense devotion and joy.
Dr. James RillingProfessors in Emory University’s Department of Anthropology and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences scanned the brains of 50 grandmothers while showing them photos of their grandchildren. (The study did not include grandfathers.) What he discovered was brain activity that at least partially explains the strong bond between grandmothers and mothers.
“What’s really striking in the data is activation in areas of the brain associated with emotional empathy,” Rilling says. “This suggests that when grandmothers interact with their grandchildren, they are trying to feel what their grandchildren are feeling. If the grandchildren are smiling, they are sensing the child’s joy. If the child is crying, they are feeling the child’s pain and suffering.”
Janet Meisel, a retired teacher with three grandchildren, wrote: Essay on Medium This title almost perfectly describes the growing emotional empathy revealed in Rilling’s research. The title is “Can grandparents feel this much love?” Her subtitle is “Sometimes my heart feels like it’s going to burst with joy, and sometimes it’s like it’s going to burst with pain.”
Reflecting on the difference between being a mother and being a grandmother, Meisel writes: It was love on steroids. ”
The new research is particularly interesting because When a woman saw a photo of her grandmother, her grandmother’s brain did not light up in the same areas. Own The kids. When the same women were shown pictures of their offspring, different areas were activated. cognition empathy. Cognitive empathy allows a person to understand what another person is feeling and why.But with emotional empathy, people experience What other people feel.
That’s no surprise to Nancy Clouse, a Connecticut grandmother of two. “It’s like I’ve melted,” she says with a sigh. “Isabella is in this magical stage where you hug her and she looks into your eyes and locks on to you and just bursts out with this smile. She’s just wriggling with happiness all over her body. , I feel very happy and this warm and joyful feeling floods over me.”
Grandparents tend to joke, “If I had known how great it would be to be a grandparent, I would have done it before I had kids.” This emotion has more to do with relationships than with brain activity. (“You can entertain the child and then give it back.”) Grandparents, of course, have less responsibility than parents. This, combined with the heightened emotional empathy swirling in their brains and the “minutiae” sensibility of many older people, makes for a fun ride.
“You can have a terrible day or you can have a great day, but when you walk into a room with your grandson or granddaughter, everything that happened before disappears instantly,” says New York grandmother. Melanie Shafran says. “I’m completely jubilant. It’s not like I don’t realize there’s chaos, but it doesn’t matter.”
For mothers and fathers, confusion is a problem. Parents tend to listen to work stress, financial stress, child stress, caregiving stress, and anything else that bothers them when their children are young.
“I don’t remember what life was like back then,” says Marti Gallardo, a grandmother of three who lives in Texas. She is planning to have two more children. “We’ve been very busy,” Ms. Gallardo, now retired from her advertising sales career, chatters, covered in “green apple skin spit.” She was watching over her 14-month-old granddaughter Claire, who only likes the inside of apples. As a grandmother and a professional woman who no longer has to rush to her job or worry about whether her baby is eating the right food, Gallardo was relaxed.
Rilling’s first study was conducted in 2021. His research involved putting 50 grandmothers into an MRI machine and observing their reactions to photos of their grandchildren, ages 3 to 12. The women were also shown photos of their own adult children. Photos of unknown people of all ages.
Data is still being analyzed. Now, Rilling is studying saliva samples to determine whether her grandmother had more oxytocin (also known as the “love hormone” because it produces good feelings) than women of the same age who weren’t her grandmother. I’m investigating. His team is also investigating whether becoming a grandmother affects the rate of brain aging, hypothesizing that the process may be slowed down. The professor also hopes to carry out long-term research that would image women’s brains before and after they become grandmothers and study their hormones. Rilling also plans to study the brains of our grandfathers.
The ecology of grandparents is “unexplored territory,” Rilling said. “Much of the research on the brains of older people is done in the context of pathology and degeneration. Here we look at the brains of healthy older people and how they were designed. He believes this is the first study to examine grandmothers’ brain activity.
That said, other non-neurological studies have shown an association between active grandparents and improved health outcomes. AARP conducted a comprehensive survey of grandparents and in its summary calls grandchildren the “elixir of immortality.” Benefits include a more physically active lifestyle, more sociability, and improved mental health.
of Berlin Aging ResearchA study that tracked the health of more than 500 people over the age of 70 found that grandparents who helped care for their grandchildren had lower mortality rates over a 20-year period than those who didn’t. Many studies have also demonstrated that having grandparents is beneficial for grandchildren.
Why did grandma’s brain evolve so much? Rilling, who is both an anthropologist and a psychologist, speculates that the close bond between grandmother and mother makes it easier for both parents to reproduce and continue the species. In everyday language, If parents can give some help to their first baby, they are likely to choose second place. Or three.
That may explain another aspect of my grandmother’s fierce love. The recognition of the past, present, and future that appears on the faces of grandchildren. “Olivia already has a little bit of her mother in her,” Kraus says of his 2-year-old granddaughter. “I don’t want to suddenly sing ‘Circle of Life’ here, but it’s about seeing your genes being passed on and moving into the future. The next generation, seeing that continuation.” That alone gives me satisfaction.”
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