Is mommy brain really a thing?
We all know the feeling; the forgetful, foggy and scatterbrained feeling many pregnant women and new mothers experience.
But is mommy brain really a thing?
Just in case you were going mad, you're not!
According to science, it seems mommy brain is really a thing.
Mommy brain
A growing body of research supports the argument that moms' brains change during pregnancy and after giving birth.
But we're still not actually able to explain why.
Most moms put their mommy brain down to fluctuating hormones postpartum, the sleep deprivation that comes with a newborn, the inevitable anxiety over new parenthood, and the general chaos that comes with parenthood.
Several small studies have come out in the past few years that support the existence of mommy brain.
Gray matter
Abigail Tucker, author of “Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct,” said that a meta analysis of all these studies concluded that women experience cognitive changes like forgetfulness and trouble with verbal recall in the immediate months and years after giving birth.
A 2017 study published in Nature Neuroscience found there is a decrease in gray matter in the area of moms’ brains that is responsible for social cognition.
This shrinkage was still present two years after childbirth, suggesting that having a baby may lead to permanent structural changes in the brain.
But experts aren’t sure what this reduction in gray matter means.
Maternal bonding
The study subjects with the largest gray matter shrinkage also tended to have the highest levels of maternal bonding.
Some experts believe the gray matter shrinkage is part of moms’ brains rewiring to adapt to their new role as parents.
This is similar in magnitude to puberty, experts suggest.
Brain pruning
“Brain shrinkage sounds sad and depressing, but people have argued that this drop in volume in certain parts of the mom brain might not actually mean these brain parts are getting worse,” Tucker says.
“There could be a neural pruning effect that goes on where these circuits are getting weeded out and being made leaner and leaner.”
Alternatively, some research suggests new mothers’ brains don’t shrink but rather grow.
Increasing brains
Pilyoung Kim, a developmental psychologist at the University of Denver who studies how mothers’ brains change during the postpartum period, says her research has shown increases in some brain areas.
These include the prefrontal cortex, which controls planning, learning and emotional regulation; in the parietal lobe, which is related to empathy; and in the temporal lobe, which helps moms understand babies’ cues.
One small 2020 study suggests that brain fog is overstated.
Study co-author Valerie Tucker Miller, an anthropology doctoral candidate at Purdue University, looked at 60 moms who were at least one year postpartum vs 70 non-mothers, and found that the new moms’ reaction times (a stand-in for attention) were as good if not better than the non-mothers’ — despite the new mothers being on average 10 years older.