Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (10 page)

In 1972, Francine “Penny” Patterson was a young graduate student in psychology at Stanford University when she met Hani-ko, a year-old gorilla at the San Francisco Zoo, and began teaching him sign language. Within two weeks the little gorilla, nicknamed “Koko,” was signing for food and juice. Project Koko became the longest continuous attempt to teach language to another species.

Today Patterson states that Koko has a vocabulary of more than 1,000 signs in American Sign Language and can understand 2,000 words. The gorilla has participated in (with human help) a live e-mail chat on AOL and conversations with famous folks like presidential speech-writer Peter Forbes, Apple CEO John Scully, and celebrities like William Shatner and Robin Williams. Other animals have since learned to sign, but few are celebs like Koko, whose initial rise to fame was linked with mothering a little kitten named All Ball.

Among young Koko’s favorite toys were books with pictures of cats. In 1984, Koko signed to Patterson that she wanted a cat. As an experiment, abandoned kittens were brought to the gorilla compound, and Patterson let Koko chose one for a pet. The gorilla picked out a round, gray male kitten with no tail and named him All Ball.

Koko mothered All Ball in devoted gorilla fashion. She tried to nurse him and carried him on her back, imitating the way gorilla mothers carry their babies in the wild. When she wanted to play with All Ball, Koko often signed the word “tickle,” and she would gently tickle the cat.

The Ron Cohen photo, “Koko and Kitten,” showed Koko cradling All Ball. Though her large arms could crush the seemingly helpless kitten, she cuddled it carefully and gazed at it fondly. That now-famous photo surprised the public, who were fascinated by the gentleness of a supposedly ferocious animal. Koko’s good mothering of All Ball won her millions of admirers.

Tragedy struck when All Ball died suddenly. In December of 1984, he escaped from his enclosure and was struck by a car. Koko seemed distraught and signed words like “cry,” “sad,” and “frown” when shown a picture of a kitten that looked like hers. Disagreement raged in the scientific community over whether or not Koko could actually grieve for her lost kitten and feel emotions in the same way that people do. Despite the arguments, the public had no trouble believing that Koko could feel a mother’s pain and loss. Expressions of sympathy and offers to replace All Ball with another kitten poured into Woodside from around the world.

Koko’s reaction to All Ball’s death and her ability to communicate those emotions sparked more research and heated debate about behaviors once considered exclusively human. Today she stands as a diplomat for the gorilla community, once believed to be bloodthirsty. Koko’s mothering and sadness at the loss of her kitten made many people rethink traditional ideas of what it is to be human and what it is to be animal. Perhaps there is more going on than we think.

Today the famous Koko cares for a gray pet cat, Smoky. Now she wants a gorilla baby to mother and love.

Science has discovered that a mom’s brain isn’t only smarter—it’s braver too!

C
onfronted by the myriad problems of raising kids, moms can feel a bit better about themselves. Research done by Dr. Craig Kinsley, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond, has given moms a much-needed boost of self-esteem by showing that being a mom can make you smarter. Kinsley has found that moms’ brains do change (for the better!) because of pregnancy and child rearing.

Kinsley did studies with rats, believing these studies also apply to people. He found that female rats with offspring were smarter. And they stayed smarter even after their pups had grown.

Motherhood doesn’t only change mom from the neck down. It also changes the brain with what Kinsley describes as “dramatic alterations.” Pregnancy and breast-feeding hormones seem to nurture the brain cells involved in learning, memory, and spatial skills. Kinsley measured these effects by setting up a maze with a Fruit Loop reward at the end. When Kinsley sent female rats through a challenging maze, he found it was always the moms who were best at finding the Fruit Loops at the end of the day. They learned faster and remembered more than the control rats who’d never mothered. Rats who were lactating (the equivalent
of breast-feeding human moms) did best of all.

“Reproduction shapes and alters a female’s brain in significant ways,” Kinsley has said. The rats who were best had actual physical changes in their brains. In nursing mama rats, the hippocampi (the part of the brain used for learning and memory) contained twice as many neural connections as those of their childless sisters. The more neural connections, the faster and better the brain works. And the good news is that the brainy improvements from motherhood continue throughout a woman’s life and may help ward off senility as she ages.

And what about a mom being cool when stressed and brave in adversity? Lab challenges with female rats showed that superheroes have nothin’ on supermoms.

To stress the female rats, they were put in scary conditions. While humans might be scared by dark, creepy places, rodents are terrified of open, lighted spaces because they cannot hide and become vulnerable to predators. The rats found themselves inside clear Plexiglas tubes placed in a brightly lighted room in an open space. The childless rats often froze with fear, while the mother rats methodically explored their surroundings, looking for an escape route. If those little whiskered moms could talk, they’d probably give motherly advice: when you’re stuck in a bad place, instead of dwelling in fear, look for a way out. The mama rats were more interested in escape, perhaps because they needed to get home to protect their young.

“Pregnancy and offspring create a more adaptive brain, one that’s generally less susceptible to fear and stress,” according to Kinsley. And in the area of fearlessness, just
as in the area of intelligence, there were physical differences in the brains of moms and nonmoms. Mother rat brains showed less activation in those regions of the brain that regulate fear.

Want to get smart, calm, and fearless too? Not interested in a babe of your own and can’t afford a tutor in physics and karate? Maybe babysitting could work for you. “Foster rats,” who’d never given birth but who cared for other rat pups, performed well on the maze tests. Male rats who were exposed to infants also improved their mental functions—though not to the same degree as the females.

Kinsley’s work does give a mom some bragging rights. But do mother rats running mazes really have that much in common with human moms driving kids to school through a maze of traffic?

Kinsley, whose research was inspired by watching his wife conquer challenges as a new mother, feels sure that there’s enough of a connection to make studies about rodents useful across species. Pregnancy hormones are similar in every species, and early MRI scans of pregnant individuals (of both lab rats and humans) show similar brain patterns. Plus, many genes are similar in rats and humans. As Kinsley says, “I like to think of humans as rats with two legs.”

Mom Fanny Blankers-Koen took the Olympics in stride

T
he year was 1948, the place, London. Fanny Blankers-Koen was 30 years old and a mother of two. What in the world was she doing competing in the Olympics?

Born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Francina Elsje Koen began competing in track and field when she was 17, a relatively late age. She made it to the 1936 Olympics, where she finished with a respectable sixth place in the high jump and fifth with the Dutch 4 x 100-meter relay team.

Jan Blankers, a former Olympian—who became both Fanny’s coach and her loving hubby—believed the tall, lanky blonde could be a gold medal athlete. But time wasn’t on Fanny’s side. Hitler’s rise to power and the outbreak of World War II nearly ruined her chances of being an Olympic athlete.

Throughout the war years, most Dutch citizens struggled just to survive. They were busier tracking the progress of the Allied forces through Europe than the progress of athletics. If they had, they might have noticed that Fanny, who was now a mother, continued to train—and to set new world records in the high jump, the long jump, and the pentathlon.

Finally the war was over and in 1948 the London Olympics began. The war-weary world celebrated the chance to watch javelins being hurled instead of bombs. Fanny Blankers-Koen celebrated by entering the 100 and 200 meter races, the 80 meter hurdles, and as the anchor for the 4 x 100-meter team relay. But most experts thought Fanny’s prime competitive years were behind her, and many thought that as a mother she shouldn’t even be there.

Back in Holland there were grumbles that Fanny should be home taking care of her house and two children. Then a British newspaper article noted that she was not only a mother but also 30 years old and the writers dismissed her as too old to be competitive. Fanny made up her mind to show everyone that a good mom can’t be beat.

The blonde streaked her way through the 100 meters in 11.9 seconds and won the gold! After a shaky start in the 80 meter hurdles, she set a new Olympic record of 11.2 seconds in a photo finish to win the gold medal. But as the finals of the 200 meter race approached, far from being excited about her triumphs, the lonely mother was in tears because she missed her kids terribly. Her husband had to remind her that she could quit at any time she wanted but that she would be sorry for it afterward.