Mumnesia is a myth:A new study by Australian National University

Mumnesia, a new study says the popular belief that pregnancy reduces memory is a myth.

The study is published in the latest issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry ,and the study was led by Helen Christensen at the Australian National University,they found no evidence that pregnancy or motherhood affects a women’s brain power.

According to report, the new findings contradict previous studies claiming that women’s brains decline in size by up to 4 per cent while they are pregnant, which potentially leading to worse performance on tests of memory and verbal skills.

“Professor Christensen’s team recruited 1,241 women aged 20-24 in 1999 and 2003 and asked them to perform a series of tasks. The women were followed up at four-year intervals and asked to perform the same cognitive tests. A total of 77 women were pregnant at the follow-up assessments, 188 had become mothers [but were not pregnant at the time of the interviews] and 542 remained childless. The researchers found no significant differences in cognitive change for women who were pregnant and those who were not.”

An explanation for this discrepancy is “It was the first time women had been recruited from the general population before pregnancy, the researchers said, suggesting previous studies may have been biased because the women were already anxious about the effect that pregnancy would have on their memory.” It’s a result that should empower mothers-to-be.

Led by Christensen ,researchers write, “Not so long ago pregnancy was ‘confinement’ and motherhood meant the end of career aspirations. [But] our results challenge the view that mothers are anything other than the intellectual peers of their contemporaries,” .

Other studies suggests that pregnancy might even boost the brain’s capabilities. A review of anxiety and cognitive changes in pregnancy, found that female rats that experienced pregnancy had decreased anxiety and even enhanced memory,greater resilience to stress, when compared with female rats that have never experienced motherhood.But these effects were less conclusive in human studies, the US researchers suggested that these advantages may also be conferred to pregnant women.

The University of Bristol in the UK researchers, late last year , found that pregnancy may improve a woman’s cognitive ability to recognise threatening or aggressive faces.