Susana Carmona

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. 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.  In this timely and compelling book, she shares a decade of groundbreaking discoveries with clarity, nuance, and care.

Lisa Mosconi, New York Times bestselling author of The Menopause Brain

Carmona's exploration of 'matrescence,' draws on extensive research that has revealed how pregnancy and motherhood reshape the brain, enhancing social connection, emotional resilience and perhaps even protecting against cognitive ageing. This fascinating book uncovers the biological brilliance of the maternal mind and is an evidence-based guide to one of the most profound transformations in human life.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, author of Inventing Ourselves

Illuminating, crammed full of fascinating research, a must read for mothers to be, and their partners!

Dr Hannah Critchlow, author of The 21st Century 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

Susana Carmona, one of the pioneering neuroscientists to first document structural changes in a new mother’s brain, also happens to be a gifted storyteller. She takes us on a detailed tour of hormonal and neural transformations during this life-altering phase in a woman’s life that is not only scientifically up-to-the minute, but also highly readable. I highly recommend this book.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature, Mothers and Others, and Father Time

A captivating, passionate and well-grounded journey through the fascinating process of “matrescence.” . . . At its heart, this book is a love letter to moms, who have been invisible to the scientific gaze for too long . . . By putting the intense and wild changes of motherhood into words, Carmona offers us a powerful and necessary story.

I want to buy this for every mother I know! Finally a book that honours mothers with the real science. An intimate and profound read that will warm your heart and make you shout out loud “mothers are goddesses".

Dr Martha Deiros Collado, author of How to Be the Grown-Up

The new science of the neuromaternal revolution

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

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