The other week, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is a new father – we’ll call him Cronus – and we were talking about parental instinct. He lowered his voice conspiratorially, considered the infant in his lap and said, “Sometimes I love my baby so much that I want to eat him. Is that normal?”
Turns out, it’s not just normal–it’s science! Olfactory chemical signals–the smells of newborn babies have been linked to dopamine spikes in the brains of new mothers, essentially triggering the same neurological reward circuit activated when a very hungry person eats, or when a heroin addict shoots up…