Anecdotally, I felt very energetic after my SfN conferences. Then I started wondering why? My friends and I were talking about this and now I am sitting reading this article (see below) and it offers a putative reason why.
Perhaps due to the fact I stayed at my friend's place - who has a young child maybe this induced more neurogenesis in my hippocampus? Let's get some of my brain in slice to check. Haha. I am reading this article and it says that dad's have many of similar changes in hormones and brain as the female. Some of the brain regions implicated are the olfactory bulb, medial preoptic area, lateral septum, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, amygdala and prefrontal cortex (see figure 1).
Alternatively, this energetic feeling could be due to my enriched environment within my friends house with their <2year old girl. Also confounding this was the fact I did Yoga twice at Yen 4 Zen Yoga studio in the Kensington village in SD (actually this was the first time ever I have done Yoga outside Canada).
Back on topic, my wife and I always debate about the fact her memory is terrible due to the children not sleeping - another issue of sleep deprivation.
When looking at figure 1c, the PFC in dad's (marmosets) who carry, protect & feed their children - they show enhanced dendritic spine density on pyramidal PFC neurons.
The article then suggests these are other issues to look into. I look forward to "finding" these articles now that I stumbled upon this area.
peace
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