A new study confirms that “baby brain” which makes new mothers forgetful, airheaded and struggle with complicated tasks is an unfounded myth.

On the contrary, researchers suggest that a woman’s mental abilities are improved during pregnancy since she is in the process of adapting herself to child-rearing and all that it entails.

The lead author of the study, Professor Helen Christensen of the Centre for Mental Health Research at Australian National University in Canberra, stated, “Part of the problem is that pregnancy manuals tell women they are likely to experience memory and concentration problems – so women and their partners are primed to attribute any memory lapse to the ‘hard to miss’ physical sign of pregnancy.

“Pregnant women may also shift their focus away from work issues to help them prepare for the birth of their new baby, while new mothers selectively attend to their baby. However, this shift in attentional focus is adaptive, and certainly cannot be labelled a ‘cognitive deficit’.”

Mental ability of 1,241 women assessed
Researchers enrolled 1,241 women aged 20-24 years in a bid to assess their mental agility. They were asked to perform a number of tasks to evaluate their cognitive speed, working memory, reasoning and ability to recall.

The women were then tracked through a four-year interval and again asked to repeat the same reasoning tests.

In the follow up period, a total of 77 women were found to be pregnant, 188 were new mothers while 542 remained childless.

An appraisal of the test scores exhibited no significant variation in the mental powers of women who had become mothers and those who had not.

The results of the study determine that neither pregnancy nor motherhood impacts the mental capability of women.

Pregnancy not linked to memory decline
Previous studies had reported that females who were pregnant or recently given birth were prone to amnesia and general mental deterioration.

However, the researchers suggest that memory lapses could be attributed to the physical and emotional stress related to pregnancy making women tired, absentminded and forgetful.

Professor Christensen said, “Not so long ago, pregnancy was ‘confinement’ and motherhood meant the end of career aspirations. Our results show that mothers are the intellectual equal of their contemporaries.

“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.”

The study, ‘Cognition in pregnancy and motherhood: prospective cohort study’, is published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.