IT DOESN’T EXIST. SO WHY DO MANY BELIEVE IN ‘BABY BRAIN’?

SURVEYS show that some three out of four women state they’re more forgetful, ‘foggy’, or lacking in concentration during pregnancy.

However, the bulk of scientific research does not support their experience.

Most studies find that pregnancy and motherhood have no effect on a woman’s memory. Plenty of studies find that pregnancy actually improves cognition.

A 2014 study in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology has examined how memory and attention change with pregnancy.

It recruited 42 pregnant women

to complete a comprehensive battery of tests on their memory, attention span, language skills, executive abilities and mood.

For every test, including memory, pregnant women performed equally as well as a matched group of 21 child-free women.

However, pregnant women consistently claimed their memory was poor or that they were ‘doing badly on the tests’. Surprisingly, their attitudes about poor memory persisted even when the researchers provided them with their scores — clear evidence to the contrary.

‘I was surprised at how strong the feeling was that they weren’t performing well,’ says Michael Larson, an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, Utah, who co-authored the study. It seems that ‘baby brain’ is an expectation we’ve absorbed without question.

Professor Larson suggests that the belief emphasising cognitive decline as ‘inevitable’ with pregnancy is related to ‘the perception of a woman as emotional and at the mercy of their hormones during their menstrual cycle’.