Why becoming a parent gives your memory a boost

THINKING about your children could boost your memory, a study suggests.

Researchers believe the improvement is explained by the need to use more brain power to protect offspring from harm.

In tests they found that memory was more important in child-raising than in finding a mate.

Ralph Miller, who led the study at Binghamton University, New York, said the findings were explained by evolution. ‘Our ability to think and memorise information arises from our nervous systems,’ said the psychology professor.

‘As our nervous systems are a product of evolution and past experiences, one can reasonably expect that how well we memorise information today is influenced by natural selection that occurred among our ancestors long ago.’

He and his colleagues tested the theory by asking subjects to imagine they were living in the ancient grass- lands of Africa, and to remember a series of words such as rock, apple, ball and stick. They were asked to rate the relevance of each item to their chances of survival.

When presented with a scenario that involved raising children they remembered many of the words. But in a task involving finding a mate the recall rate was not so high.

The researchers said while both activities relate to survival, our prehistoric ancestors may not have realised that mating could result in children, because of the nine months between mating and birth.

Professor Miller, whose work was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Cognition and Memory, said: ‘These findings testify to the remarkable effect that specific situations thousands of years ago, situations of which we have no conscious memory, have on our brains today. The specific functioning of our brains, like our height and hair colour, is strongly influenced by genes that were selected for among our ancestors.’

‘Grasslands of Africa’