Studying v. Baby Brain...GOODLUCK

Just wanted to share this little article on baby brain. After Kelley was just explaining about having to take a huge exam in 4-6 weeks I thought this was kind of amusing. Though Kelley may have "baby brain" she hardly needs help when it comes to taking tests. She could pass this test in the middle of giving birth if she wanted, but I don't think we will try. Enjoy the reading.
-RYAN
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Why having a baby really does make women more forgetful

Published Date: 07 February 2008
By Lyndsay Moss
Health Correspondent

WOMEN have long suspected that being pregnant has an effect on their memory – now research has confirmed expecting a baby can make you more forgetful. The so-called "baby brain" effect can have an impact on women's ability to remember new information during pregnancy and for many months after birth, researchers in Australia have found. Hormonal changes and sleep deprivation have been blamed for the condition, which is believed to affect up to 80 per cent of women. Some studies have also suggested a woman's brain may change size during pregnancy.

For the latest investigation, the researchers carried out a review of pregnancy studies conducted over the past 30 years. These showed that pregnant women had "modest deficits" in memory, especially when information was new or presented in a challenging way. Dr Julie Henry, a psychology researcher at the University of New South Wales, said: "The memory deficits many women experience during and after pregnancy are pretty much like the modest deficits you'd find when comparing healthy 20-year-olds with healthy 60-year-olds."

Dr Henry and co-investigator Professor Peter Rendell, of the Australian Catholic University, compared the memory performances of more than 1,000 pregnant women, mothers and healthy non-pregnant females involved in 14 studies around the world. They found that pregnant women were significantly impaired on some, but not all, measures of memory. They experienced most difficulty with memory tasks that relied on "executive cognitive control" – those involving novelty or significant effort." Regular, well-practised memory tasks – such as remembering phone numbers of friends and family members – are unlikely to be affected," Prof Rendell said. "It's a different story, though, when you have to remember new phone numbers or people's names, or hold in mind several pieces of information, such as when multi-tasking.

"The work, published in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, is one of the first to confirm the suspicion from endless subjective reports that "baby brain" is a real phenomenon. The results indicate that the impairment is still evident a year after childbirth, but no studies have yet investigated beyond this period.


What do you think Louise? Do you think there's any truth to this? Hopefully not, for Kelley's sake :-)