The story behind a legendary image, a viral misunderstanding, and the real science of love between mother and child.
In our living room there is a corner.
A photo corner. Photos of my boys, from babyhood to today. Between cooking, after a long shift, before I go to bed: I pause in front of it several times a day. I look. And I think, each time again, the same thing: this is where I recharge.
I wanted to put that somewhere. Because it is no coincidence that today I want to write about another image. One that the whole world has now seen.
Perhaps you recognise this photo.
An MRI scan in black and white. A mother curled around her baby. She presses a kiss to his head. You see both their brains, translucent, like two medallions folded into each other. Here and there little orange-red spots glow. The image feels tender, fragile, universal. Something in you unfolds when you look at it.
Beneath the photo there is usually a text that runs roughly like this: that the mother’s kiss triggers a chemical reaction in the baby’s little head, that dopamine is released for the feeling of happiness, and oxytocin, the “love hormone”, for safety and trust. Love is just one kiss away.
I have kept this photo myself for years. It moves me every single time.
And yet.
Before I wrote about it, I went looking at what could really be found about this image. And what I learned, I found in the end even more beautiful than the story going around.
Who made the photo, and why
The image was made in April 2015 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a 3 Tesla MRI scanner at the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center. The scientist behind the image is Dr Rebecca Saxe, professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT. Not, as the viral text claims, a neurologist. That is an important difference: neurologists treat diseases of the nervous system, while cognitive neuroscientists study how the brain makes thinking, feeling and behaviour possible.
What is more, Saxe is not only the maker of the image. She is also the mother in the image. The baby is her own son, Percy, two months old. Together with her colleague Atsushi Takahashi she adapted the scanner so that she could lie in the tunnel with her baby against her chest, long enough to make the image.
Why? In Smithsonian Magazine she explained it plainly herself: no one, as far as she knew, had ever made an MR image of a mother and child before — and she made this one simply because she wanted to see it. No diagnostic purpose. No experiment. Just: because no one had ever seen it.
What the coloured spots are not
Here the story becomes honest and important.
The orange-red spots in the brains in the photo are not dopamine. They are not oxytocin. Nor do they show the chemical reaction of the kiss.
That would not even be scientifically possible. At present there is still no way to measure oxytocin or dopamine directly in the brain of a living human being. We can measure levels in blood and saliva, or see how the brain responds when someone is given oxytocin. But in an ordinary MRI those substances do not appear as glowing spots.
The spots on this photo come from a different study by Saxe herself, research into how babies process faces. They show which brain regions, in this specific mother and baby, used more oxygen when they looked at faces, compared with nature photographs.
Saxe herself publicly set this straight in September 2019 on Twitter, when the misunderstanding went viral again. Her message: the image remains beautiful, but the explanation beneath it is not correct.
Why this matters
Here I want to pause for a moment. I am not writing this to tear something down.
I am writing it because honesty is the foundation of trust. If I put things on this blog that sound lovely but are not true, I am no longer a writer — I am a conduit for noise. And you deserve better than noise. You deserve someone who checks her source, even when that source is emotionally appealing. Especially then.
But there is something even more beautiful. The truth behind this image is not smaller than the story beneath it. It is larger.
What really happens when a mother kisses her baby
Over the past twenty years, hundreds of studies have shown how deeply rooted in biology the mother–child connection is. Not through one coloured spot on a scan, but through a fine interplay of hormones, brain regions and behaviour that unfolds over weeks and months.
Oxytocin. When mother and baby touch, hold, look at each other, or breastfeed, oxytocin levels rise in both their bodies, measurable in blood and saliva. Oxytocin is often called the “love hormone”, but more precisely it is a bonding hormone: it makes social contact rewarding and lowers the stress response.
Dopamine. At the same time, seeing one’s own child activates the mother’s reward system, especially the striatum and the nucleus accumbens. These are precisely the same brain regions that become active for other things we find deeply important. According to a review by neuroscientist Ruth Feldman in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, oxytocin and dopamine work together in this region to direct motivation, focus and social attention onto the baby. And it need not even involve a baby in the flesh: fMRI studies show that the same reward regions also activate at merely a photo of one’s own child. That is, biologically speaking, probably what happens in me when I stand at home in front of my photo corner.
Synchrony. One of Feldman’s most powerful findings: over time, mother and baby begin to synchronise — in heartbeat, in gaze, in breathing rhythm, in pitch of voice. A kind of biological duet that, without our consciously noticing, builds the attachment system.
And perhaps the most important of all, for every parent who has ever worried: in about 1 in 10 mothers this connection does not get going on its own. That is not a failure. It is biology that sometimes needs time, or help. Researchers in Heidelberg are even developing targeted treatments for this.
The beauty beneath
So what the viral text was trying to say is, at its core, true after all — only not through that one kiss and that one scan. It is true through a thousand small moments together.
The kiss is not one chemical trigger. The kiss is a small chapter in a much larger, deeper story that writes itself anew every day, in every family, in every body that opens itself to another.
And that story — connection that steers hormones, brain regions and behaviour — applies not only to mother and baby. According to Feldman’s research, every other form of love builds on this primal foundation: romantic love, friendship, caring for those who grow older or more ill than we are. The mother–child blueprint lives on in every bond we form.
Why I keep this image
Despite everything. Perhaps precisely now.
Saxe wrote in Smithsonian Magazine that her image became universal through its anonymity: without faces, without hair, without clothes, the two figures could be any mother and any child, at any moment in history.
That is the image in its deepest layer. Not a neurochemical instructional video. A symbol. A reminder of something that arises between people when there is space, time and tenderness.
And that — that needs no spot on a scan to be true.
A question to carry with you
Think of a moment of deep connection in your own life — with a child, a parent, a loved one, a friend. A moment in which something invisible shifted. Most likely no glowing spot appeared in your brain.
How do you know all the same that it happened — and what would have been different in your life if that moment had never been?
Related reading
Sources
- Saxe, R. (2015). Why I Captured This MRI of a Mother and Child. Smithsonian Magazine, 19 November 2015.
- Baranger, D. (2019). Fact check: those red blobs aren’t oxytocin. Massive Science, 10 October 2019.
- Feldman, R. (2017). The Neurobiology of Human Attachments. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), 80–99. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2016.11.007. Accessed via PubMed.
- Numan, M., & Young, L. J. (2016). Neural mechanisms of mother-infant bonding and pair bonding. Hormones and Behavior, 77, 98–112. DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2015.05.015. Accessed via PubMed.
- Strathearn, L., & Mayes, L. C. (2010). Cocaine addiction in mothers: potential effects on maternal care and infant development. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1187, 172–183. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05142.x. Accessed via PubMed.
- Eckstein, M., et al. (2019). The NeMo real-time fMRI neurofeedback study: protocol of a randomised controlled clinical intervention trial in the neural foundations of mother-infant bonding. BMJ Open, 9(7), e027747. DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-027747. Accessed via PubMed.
Disclaimer: This blog is about scientific research into the brain and the mother–child connection. It is not medical advice. If you experience that the connection with your baby or child does not come about on its own — please contact your GP, midwife or health visitor. This is more common than you think, and good help is available.
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