Ruth Feldman, a neuroscientist at the Center for Developmental, Social, and Relationship Neuroscience at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel and an adjunct faculty member at the Yale School of Medicine, has spent the past 20 years studying the impact of parenting on the brains of both men and women. She says the adult human brain is capable of the greatest plasticity during the period around the birth of one’s child, and that’s true for moms and dads: “While only mothers experience pregnancy, birth, and lactation, evolution created other pathways for the adaptation to the parental role in human fathers, and these alternative pathways come with practice, attunement, and day-by-day caregiving.”