Rethinking pregnancy and the nervous system
Our entire understanding of pregnancy’s first trimester might need radically to change
A deceptively calm but profoundly probing proposal essay was our first draft text this month. The essay spanned medicine, ancient philosophy, and motherhood-related personal traumas to ponder new interventions for the first trimester of pregnancy.
The author wrote that the first trimester is not usually seen as a fruitful zone for medical monitoring or intervention, since almost a third of pregnancies spontaneously self-terminate, typically due to genetic defects that would have made the fetus unviable anyway. However, the author went on to ask, what if this lack of medical interest in the first trimester is a lost opportunity for the other two thirds of fetuses that are viable? Drawing on cutting-edge understanding of placental biology, the author explored the possibility that the monitoring and management of stressors related to the mother's environment and diet could be a worthwhile intervention during the first trimester.
We paid particular attention in our discussion of this text to how a writer can best leverage personal experiences in a piece of science writing. Should an author's own story frame the whole text from the very beginning, so as to hook the reader with a sympathetic personal angle? Or, can a piece of science writing begin with an impersonal but interesting scientific question, and then partway in, surprise the reader and deepen the story by revealing the author's own personal stake in the question? We thought it might be worth trying both approaches and workshopping the results to gauge reader reactions.
From animal spirits to polyvagal theory, the wild history of “the nervous system”
Our second text this month took us time traveling back to the beliefs of the ancient Greeks and then Descartes in the 1600s, when nerves were thought to be hollow tubes inhabited by restless animal spirits. The text went on to describe how in the late 1700s, nerves were reconceived through the early science of physics as electrical impulses, and brains came to be thought of as big electrical batteries. By the late 1800s, though, nerve cells had been discovered, and here the text immersed us in the author's main topic: the 19th-century notion of nerve cells forming a single continuous network.
This idea of a single network—still reflected in our mainstream discourse today about "the nervous system" and how to regulate it—was, however, never really accurate. The text went on to describe how modern neuroscience has since identified a rich diversity of separate neural groupings and functions linked to specific aspects of human behavior and experience. Yet after more than a century, the old idea of "the nervous system" as a meaningful term seems more prevalent than ever, especially in popular therapy language. Our text suggested that the risk with this is that people's problems may often be much more localized and specific, and thus the solutions may be as well.
In providing feedback on this text, we were particularly impressed with the way the author used a friendly and fascinating little tour through the weird history of science to encourage the audience, almost without us realizing it, to start questioning a ubiquitous popular idea today. If the text had confronted conventional wisdom directly at the beginning, we might have gotten defensive. Instead, we were enjoying quirky stories about animal spirits and brain batteries when we started to realize that some the stories we tell ourselves might be a bit quirky, too.
Composite Image: Valeria Stoganenko / icon ade, Vecteezy