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Chapter 10: Babies on His Brain

A baby can change a man’s mind. Take Peter’s mind as an example. After having two young girls, he finds himself perceptive of the cries and squirmings of little ones, whether in a grocery store, in an airplane, on a playground, or in a coffee shop. Babies surrounded him in all of these same places before he had kids. Yet somehow he did not perceive them. It wasn’t until he had his own kids that babies entered his brain—and his social vision. He’s probably not alone. In a study that measured changes in pupil area (an index of a person’s social orientation) in response to looking at pictures of various things, babies elicited no changes in men’s eyes, and mothers and babies together barely altered men’s eyes, yet either type of image noticeably altered women’s eyes. So what did modify men’s attention? Men’s pupils opened up at the sight of naked women (Eibl Eibesfeldt 1989: 255). In this chapter, we focus on two issues concerning babies on the male brain. First, what are the psychological impacts of parenting on men? As men transition into fatherhood, they experience a variety of changes in their emotional life and quality of life, and we want to describe and understand these. Second, what are the physiological mechanisms underlying the psychological and behavioral transitions associated with fatherhood? In what is essentially a new science of human fatherhood, we can begin to tease apart the physiological substrates underlying these transitions to fatherhood. Grab a place in a functional imaging machine, listen to infant cries, and watch your brain respond to these infant stimuli. Or let researchers measure your hormone levels while you