BABY BRAIN WILL FADE
NEW STUDY SURE TO MAKE NEW MOTHERS HAPPY
A new study from Perdue University has confirmed our forgetfulness has a life span... and us mums are actually superior in one key area.
Women have long claimed that being pregnant induces forgetfulness, loss of focus or even reduced motor function.
A new study now backs this claim. Baby brain refers to the memory problems experienced by pregnant women and new mums.
A study back in 2018 confirmed baby brain is in fact, a real thing.
Just a few months later, it was also confirmed that baby brain makes you smarter, and previous to that, in 2017, it was argued that baby brain actually goes forever.
It appears as though research on the topic can be varied, but a recent report has confirmed one of the above, and we think it’s such great news that it’s worth sharing.
The new study from Purdue University was published online in the journal Current
Psychology, and it confirmed mothers performed equally as well or better compared to women who had never been pregnant or had children.
Researchers used a revised version of the Attention Network Test (ANT), called the ANT-R, to compare reaction times among 60 mothers in the United States, all of whom were at least one year postpartum, and 70 non-mothers.
Mothers whose children were over one year of age were specifically selected for this study as many similar studies have focussed on the first year postpartum, but there has been limited data relating to subsequent years.
Therefore, they were able to see if women were affected beyond the first year postpartum.
Valerie Tucker Miller, a Ph.D. student in Purdue University’s Department of Anthropology, said: “Overall, mums did not have significantly different attention than non-mothers, so we did not find evidence to support ‘mummy brain’ as our culture understands it. It’s possible, if anything, that maternity is related to improved, rather than diminished, attentiveness.”
The researchers also found that mothers had similar alerting and orienting attention, and better executive control attention, compared to non-mothers.
“Mums were not as distracted by those outside, incongruent items,” Miller said.
“It makes perfect sense that mums who have brought children into this world have more stimuli that needs to be processed to keep themselves and other humans alive, and then to continue with all the other tasks that were required before the children.”
Why do we suffer from baby brain during pregnancy and when we have a newborn baby?
The answer is quite logical when you think about it.
“When you first have a child, you have a cascade of hormones and sleep deprivation that might be affecting attention and memory processes in the brain,” Miller explained.
We’ve all been there - pouring milk into your hand bag, or leaving your car keys in the fridge. These are the sort of things we do when we’re so exhausted we can’t think straight. Sounds a lot like early motherhood to us...
So really... the effects should be easily reversed with a little relaxation and a lot of sleep.