Oxytocin = Mom vs Frontal Cortex = Madam President

Industrial revolution marked the dawn of expotential rise of human comfortableness but it also opened up a new predicament for women - be a housekeeper and continue being the psycological-pillar of the family or step outside the comfort zone and translate their cognitive skills into $$. This debate continues to this day (more vociferous in developing countries). This excellent article gives an evolutionary arguement that women are predisposed to both roles and debunks the unfair stereotype. Oxytocin effects are:

"The notion that females are more highly invested in their children than males is being confirmed by findings in biochemistry and neuroscience, as these disciplines clarify the role of hormones—particularly testosterone and oxytocin—in sexual and reproductive behavior. Like the male sex hormone testosterone, oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus. But in most other respects, it is the anti-testosterone. Instead of fueling aggression, it promotes attachment, reduces fear, and leads to feelings of pleasure and well-being. Testosterone appears in males at far higher levels than in females; oxytocin, on the other hand, is more prevalent in females. Women have many more oxytocin receptors in their brains than men do, and those receptors rev up during orgasm, childbirth, and breast-feeding—signaling that at a biological level, the boundaries most of us take as axiomatic between sexual pleasure, reproduction, and mothering are not all that clear. Hrdy goes so far as to conclude that “the ‘afterglow’ from climax is an ancient ‘maternal’ rather than sexual response.” In females, in other words, the maternal urge shapes the sexual urge.

Oxytocin may explain what Katie Roiphe, a journalism professor at New York University, meant when, in a recent essay, she described an “addiction” to her newborn baby that left her indifferent to work. Many female readers were perturbed: Roiphe was feeding the cult of motherhood, they said; maternal love is neither an interesting nor a useful subject for women today.

But surely it’s worth understanding the natural forces at work in our everyday experience. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our neural systems evolved in ways that enhanced survival. Maternal attachment was essential to that project, since babies without mothers were at much higher risk of death. Evolution selected for women like Roiphe and Rosin who wanted to hold and nurse their infants. Since women with more oxytocin receptors were most successful at reproducing, they tended to pass down the genes that ensured the same hormonal sensitivity in their offspring. Conversely, for survival, infants needed to attach to their mothers; not surprisingly, oxytocin is transmitted to babies in breast milk. (Researchers are pursuing evidence that autistics, who have trouble attaching emotionally to others, are abnormally low in oxytocin.)

There may or may not be a “maternal instinct”—like many female academics, Hrdy objects to the term—but there is a hormone that amounts to almost the same thing. It inclines females to feed, cuddle, and fuss over their young, and leaves men at peace."

Frontal lobe lingers effecting:

"If that were evolutionary psychology’s whole story about women, then its experts would be proclaiming patriarchy as our destiny, which they don’t tend to do. In fact, as neuroscientists and geneticists piece together the human brain’s evolution, it’s becoming clear that, if it’s natural for a woman to go crazy over her babies, it’s also natural for a woman to run the State Department. The same human female brain that’s primed with oxytocin is, like the male brain, a fantastically complex machine, capable of reasoning, innovative problem solving, and maneuvering through hugely varied social environments—whether the PTA, a corporate headquarters, or Congress.

Human beings are called Homo sapiens for good reason. We evolved brains proportionately bigger than any other animal’s, and when it comes to the gray stuff, size matters. The human cranial space is taken up by a large, densely wired frontal cortex, which allows us to create sentences and paragraphs, think abstractly, and plan for tomorrow’s meeting or next year’s vacation, all cognitive activities far beyond the capacity of any animal. The cortex is also the driver for human culture. When you ponder a picture of the Taj Mahal or attend a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, thank the evolution of the human brain. In a related way, the frontal cortex gives humans, unlike animals, the potential to control urges from the limbic system, whether for the second piece of red velvet cake or for the brunette behind the Starbucks counter. Next time you go to the zoo, look at the chimp’s low, recessed brow. Then check out your own bulging pate. That, clever reader, is your frontal cortex.

The frontal cortex is the reason that sexual selection does not provide the rigid behavioral script for humans that it does for animals. The chimpanzee brain gives the mating male and reproducing female no choice about how to go about the business. It’s humans who have invented everything from love marriages to purdah, from bordellos to nunneries.

Evolutionary psychologists are sometimes accused of not giving proper due to the flexibility of the human brain. In her recent book Mothers and Others, for instance, Hrdy argues that just as animal males don’t tend to their infants, so human fathers can’t be expected to hang around for the long run. But at their best, scientists are apt to describe the brain as chemically and neurologically predisposed to certain behaviors—nurturing babies in the case of women, for instance—while capable of adapting these behaviors to enormously varied environments. Sometimes those environments even change the brain’s chemistry, a process that the writer Matt Ridley calls “nature via nurture.” When Hrdy presumes the fecklessness of men, she underestimates the environmental pressure of social norms. The human record suggests that social norms, especially the universal one of marriage, can reinforce fathers’ ties to their children, which in turn might even become part of the male neural architecture. Recently, neuroscientists have even discovered evidence that married men’s testosterone levels fall at the birth of their baby."

That was one fascinating theory but the big question is what happens with the "unused" potential of frontal cortex (for a non-working women), as and when the technology and infrastructure improves tremodously, making most of the stuff done (outside of the Oxytocin zone, may be some inside but lets not go there now) by them now render useless? Isn't that a sheer waste of potential? How can they contribute more rather than say watching soap-opera on TV? Given the level of poverty, unemployment et al in the world, this question is no where in the near vicinity of being bedated but someday in near future, it will one of the most important issues facing the society.This coginitive surplus has immense potential.