A Mother Kisses Her Baby in an MRI: Those Spots Are Not Oxytocin

The story behind a legendary image, a viral misunderstanding, and the real science of love between mother and child.

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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.¹ 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.² Her scanner was not built to image two people at once. It took considerable modifications and months of talks with technicians to make it possible.² Her colleague Atsushi Takahashi is credited alongside her as maker of the image.¹ In the end it took two days, with roughly twenty-five attempts each day, to get this single shot.²

Why? In Smithsonian Magazine she explained it plainly herself: “No one, to my knowledge, had ever made an MR image of a mother and child. We made this one because we wanted to see it.” No diagnostic purpose. No experiment. Just: because no one had ever seen it.¹

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.³

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.³ 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.

And here the nuance belongs straight away. Even those measurements in blood and saliva are contested among researchers. Different methods produce values that diverge widely and that barely correlate with one another.⁴ So it is not that we can measure oxytocin well and simply not inside the head. We can measure it only with difficulty anywhere.

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.^3,5

Saxe herself publicly set this straight on 12 September 2019, in a thread on Twitter, when the misunderstanding went viral again.⁶ 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.⁷

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.⁷ And it need not even involve a baby in the flesh: in an fMRI study of twenty-eight mothers, the same reward regions lit up at merely a photo of their own child, and most strongly at a smiling face.⁸ 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.⁷

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.⁹

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, 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.⁷ Animal studies point the same way: the brain circuits that build the bond between mother and young in mammals turn out, in monogamous species, to carry the bond between partners as well.¹⁰ 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 many viewers were moved precisely by the anonymity of the image: without faces, without hair, without clothes, the two figures could be any mother and any child, at any time or place in history.¹

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

• Your Brain Is Not an Honest Witness
• The Scar That Wasn’t There
• Why Your Brain Is Never Satisfied

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Sources

The numbers in the text refer to this list.

1. Saxe, R. (2015, December). Why I captured this MRI of a mother and child. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why–captured-MRI-mother-child-180957207/
2. Pawlowski, A. (2015, December). See MRI image capturing pure love of mom and baby, from the inside. TODAY. https://www.today.com/health/stunning-mri-image-offers-modern-twist-mom-baby-photo-t60856
3. Baranger, D. (2019, October 10). Fact check: Those red blobs aren’t oxytocin. Massive Science. https://massivesci.com/notes/setting-record-straight-mother-infant-mri-not-oxytocin/
4. MacLean, E. L., Wilson, S. R., Martin, W. L., Davis, J. M., Nazarloo, H. P., & Carter, C. S. (2019). Challenges for measuring oxytocin: The blind men and the elephant? Psychoneuroendocrinology, 107, 225–231. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.05.018
5. Deen, B., Richardson, H., Dilks, D. D., Takahashi, A., Keil, B., Wald, L. L., Kanwisher, N., & Saxe, R. (2017). Organization of high-level visual cortex in human infants. Nature Communications, 8, Article 13995. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13995
6. Saxe, R. [@rebecca_saxe]. (2019, September 12). My MRI Mother and Child has become the focus of a controversy this weekend. Here’s the story. Thread. 1/14 [Post]. X, formerly Twitter. https://twitter.com/rebecca_saxe/status/1171979487489286146
7. Feldman, R. (2017). The neurobiology of human attachments. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), 80–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.11.007
8. Strathearn, L., Li, J., Fonagy, P., & Montague, P. R. (2008). What’s in a smile? Maternal brain responses to infant facial cues. Pediatrics, 122(1), 40–51. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2007-1566
9. Eckstein, M., Zietlow, A.-L., Gerchen, M. F., Schmitgen, M. M., Ashcroft-Jones, S., Kirsch, P., & Ditzen, B. (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), Article e027747. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-027747
10. Numan, M., & Young, L. J. (2016). Neural mechanisms of mother-infant bonding and pair bonding: Similarities, differences, and broader implications. Hormones and Behavior, 77, 98–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2015.05.015

Sources on this site are cited in APA style, with a DOI wherever one exists. Why I made that choice →

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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.