AUSTRALIA — While it may well be true that plenty of women weren’t in their right mind when they became pregnant, a recent study insists that there’s nothing wrong with women’s brains when they are pregnant — regardless of old wives’ tales to the contrary.According to mental health researchers at the Australian National University, interviews with 2,500 women between the ages of 20 and 24 in 1999, then again in 2003 and 2007 show no differences in logic and memory abilities for women, including those who were pregnant during one interview but not others.
Of those women interviewed during the course of the study, 76 were pregnant during the second or third stages. Their test results showed no difficulty in thinking logically or remembering.
Team leader, professor Helen Christensen confirmed to the AFP that “there were no differences between them and control women.”
The question, Christensen proposes, is actually “why (pregnant) women think they have poor memories when the best evidence we have is that they don’t.”
Although Christensen concedes that there’s the possibility that tests simply have not been able to detect nuanced changes in the memory and logic centers of pregnant women’s brains, she believes that the truth is that women simply associate their pregnancies with mental goofs because their pregnancies are so much on their minds at the time.
“It makes it very easy to attribute what might be just normal lapses in memory to pregnancy,” Christensen observes, pointing out that mother rats have been shown to actually improve their multi-tasking abilities, as well as find their way through mazes more directly and experience less anxiety and fear; all of which are handy traits to have when raising small offspring.
Christensen hypothesizes that “There’s enormous changes in the rat brain during pregnancy, so you might actually expect that women perform better during pregnancy than when they’re not pregnant.”
