How the Menstrual Cycle Changes Women's Brains - For the Better
by Zaria Gorvett for BBC:Right after a period, women have better spatial awareness. Three weeks after, verbal skills peak. It turns out the monthly cycle does change the brain – but not in the ways you think.In the beginning, there was ‘hysteria’. From the medical magicians of ancient Egypt to the bearded philosophers of Classical Greece, men have pondered this condition for millennia. The tell-tale signs were extremely broad, including anxiety and erotic fantasies, but one thing was clear - it only happened to women.Plato believed hysteria was caused by the mourning womb, which was sad when it wasn’t carrying a child. His contemporaries said it arose when the organ wandered around the body, becoming trapped in different body parts. The latter belief persisted well into the 19th Century, when the disorder was famously treated by bringing women to orgasm with early vibrators.Even today, the notion that a woman’s biology can befuddle her brain is a staple of popular culture. If a woman is moody, she’s asked if it’s ‘that time of the month’. If she’s feeling sexual, she’s told she might be ovulating.It turns out this isn’t unfounded – some women really do feel more anxious and irritable around their period, and it’s true that we’re more motivated by sex around the time an egg is released. (Of course, that isn’t to say that symptoms can always, or usually, can be explained this way; it’s important to remember that the tendency to attribute women’s complaints to conditions like ‘hysteria’ can have dangerous results.)But what’s not widely known is that the menstrual cycle can affect women’s brains in positive ways, too.It turns out that women are more adept at certain skills, such as spatial awareness, after their period. Three weeks after, they are significantly better communicators – and, oddly, particularly good at telling when others are feeling fearful. Finally, for part of their cycles their brains are actually bigger. What’s going on?Instead of rogue wombs, the main source of these changes is the ovaries, which release oestrogen and progesterone in different quantities throughout the month. The hormones are primarily tasked with thickening the lining of the womb and deciding when to release an egg. They also have profound effects on women’s brains and behaviour.Scientists have been studying the menstrual cycle since the 1930s. It’s a surprisingly popular research topic, and we now know that it has all kinds of quirky effects, from influencing a woman’s ability to give up smoking to the types of dreams she has each night.But this mountain of knowledge wasn’t born out of a fascination with female biology. Instead, it was driven by a desire to understand the ways in which men and women are different – and why.One example of this difference is in our brains. The physical differences between the sexes extend to these wrinkly organs, and scientists have suspected for years that they are down to hormones. “Basically we jump on these natural fluctuations in sex hormone levels that we find,” says Markus Hausmann, a neuroscientist at the University of Durham. “This might be the menstrual cycle in women, or seasonal fluctuations in testosterone levels in men. It’s a full natural experiment.”One way women are different is that they have superior social skills. Women have better empathy and theory of mind – the understanding that other humans may have a perspective different to our own. They also have better communication skills. This is thought to be part of the reason that male children are four times more likely to be diagnosed with high-functioning autism; girls are better at disguising their symptoms.“Women speak sooner than men, they’re more verbally fluent than men, and they’re actually better at spelling than men,” says Pauline Maki, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago.This social advantage is thought to have evolved because, thousands of years ago, articulate mothers would have been better at conveying vital information to their children – such as not to eat certain poisonous plants.But are hormones involved? And if so, how much?Hormonal balanceBack in 2002, together with colleagues from the Gerontology Research Center in Baltimore, Maki set out to learn how fluctuating oestrogen levels affect women’s abilities over the course of each month. Each participant was assessed twice: once just after their period, when oestrogen and progesterone levels were low, and once about a week after they ovulated, when oestrogen and progesterone were high.It was a small study, involving 16 women who were asked to complete a range of mental tests. But the findings were notable.During days when the participants had more female hormones in their systems, they were significantly worse at the things men are usually good at (like spatial awareness) and much better at the things women tend to have an edge in (such as the ability to come up with new words). When their hormone levels were lower, their spatial awareness was restored.One ability that improved when female hormones was higher was ‘implicit remembering’, which Maki describes as the subconscious, effortless kind of memory. “If I said to you, ‘Oh, what was the last Uber fare you had – was it more or less than the Lyft fare?’ And then later on, I asked you, ‘How do you spell fare?’. You might spell it f-a-r-e, even though most people spell it f-a-i-r. Because somewhere your brain encoded ‘fare’ and that was heightened.”These implicit word memories are important for developing communication skills. They’re the reason we often find ourselves using obscure words or turns of phrase, like “Oh, he was so obstinate”, just after hearing someone else use them, or reading them in an article.