There are changes in the brain (during pregnancy and early motherhood) ? concrete, measurable changes, and later, the way we think and behave is changed.

Motherhood is an especially powerful experience because it involves learning under high-stakes conditions, which is just the sort of learning that drives change in the brain.

Take this one in my belly. He (or she) is determined to be here. I can feel the force of his being. It's as if he has something to do here and just wants to arrive and grow up so he can get to it.

Angelina has made pregnancy and motherhood fashionable. She's expanded the notion of what a family is, and that has a great deal of impact.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

There is no other time in a woman's life when she needs to be quite as smart as when she is looking after young children.