“Baby brain” is a myth

Neither pregnancy nor motherhood make women more prone to memory lapses, say experts, hoping to dispel the myth of “baby brain.” In a study of 1,241 women both before and after having babies, Australian researchers gave women memory tests at four-year intervals, and found the test scores remained unchanged before and after pregnancy. They also didn’t differ greatly between the group of women who became mothers, and those who did not (more than half the women became pregnant over the course of the study). “Our results challenge the view that mothers are anything other than the intellectual peers of their contemporaries,” the researchers told the BBC. “Women and their partners need to be less automatic in their willingness to attribute common memory lapses to a growing or new baby. And obstetricians, family doctors and midwives may need to use the findings from this study to promote the fact that ‘placenta brain’ is not inevitable.”