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A Mother's Brain

The groundbreaking new neuroscience of motherhood
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A Mother's Brain

By: Susana Carmona
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Brought to you by Penguin.

AS FEATURED IN THE BBC DOCUMENTARY BABY BRAIN: WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON?

85% of women experience pregnancy at some point in their lives. It is an experience enabling the very existence of our species. Yet the neuroscience of this first step in the process of nurturing the next generation has seen little serious, rigorous study—until now. Susana Carmona’s leading edge research for over a decade makes A Mother’s Brain a landmark in ending sexual bias in women’s health. Among her many ongoing initiatives, she is building a unique longitudinal database tracking how mothers’ brains change from preconception to several years after childbirth.

Drawing on her studies of individual mothers, Carmona writes with empathy about the challenges of motherhood from the reshaping of a woman’s immune system and hormonal dynamics to the geography of her cortex and its plasticity. Her book reveals that pregnancy triggers rapid changes in the brain, guided by hormones, that seem to nurture maternal well-being and mother-baby bonding. Some cells with the baby’s genetic code cross into the mother, and that the code can reside in the mother’s brain for the rest of her life.

© Susana Carmona 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
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Critic reviews

A powerful, awe-inspiring, beautiful book. A Mother's Brain is fascinating, thrilling, consoling and accessible, a groundbreaking work by a pioneering scientist at the cutting-edge of matrescence research. Carmona shows us how, as a society, we need to honor the intensity of pregnancy, birth and new motherhood, rather than dismiss it. A must read for all. (Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood)
Dr. Susana Carmona has been a pioneer in shaping our understanding of the maternal brain. Her research has brought scientific rigor to a topic too often dismissed or misunderstood. In this timely and compelling book, she shares a decade of groundbreaking discoveries that illuminate how motherhood reshapes the brain—with clarity, nuance, and care. (Lisa Mosconi, New York Times bestselling author of The Menopause Brain)
Susana Carmona is a tour-de-force... [Her] groundbreaking work tackles fundamental questions about the maternal brain, discoveries that are poised to deepen our basic understanding of the human brain and its stunning capacity for plasticity in adulthood. (Emily Jacobs, director of the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative, UC Santa Barbara)
I am happy to know now that during my pregnancy, my brain changed as much as it did during my adolescence, and that its changes helped me bond more deeply with my daughter… Susana correctly reminds us that motherhood isn’t just a physical transformation. It’s a journey that goes to our very cores… She writes with erudition, intimacy, and rigor, drawing on her own experience and foundation of scientific expertise as she accompanies us on the voyage that gives humanity life. (Nazareth Castellanos, Chair of Cognitive Sciences, University of Madrid, previously at the Max Planck Institute and King's College London)
Susana illuminates the maternal brain—how its size and functionality changes, the way it receives genetic information from the placenta, how it's permanently altered by pregnancy, and more. A Mother’s Brain is the perfect guide to understanding a transformative process that sits at the center of humanity. (Dana Suskind, MD, NYT bestselling author of Thirty Million Words and Human Raised)
As a long-term neuroscientist, and a brand-new grandfather, I was absorbed by Susana Carmona’s A Mother’s Brain. Beyond the value of her lucid writing, she has provided parents and health professionals with something that has been strangely missing—a authoritative, scientific overview of what goes on in the brain at this crucial time in the lives of mothers and their babies. (Joseph LeDoux, author of Anxious and Starting Over)
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