Sorry, what were you saying?
Around 16 years ago, your Back Page scribe was a brand-new parent with a baby who wouldn’t sleep unless she was held.
As we vaguely recall, there was orange juice accidentally poured over cereal, cups of coffee being reheated by running an empty microwave with no coffee within, and embarrassingly overdue toddler library books.
A toddler was once absentmindedly buckled into a grey Subaru that was identical to our own but had the wrong, bemused, husband inside.
Such was the exhaustion and brain fog of those early years that I took to counting each child and stroller present in the car before driving off, in case I left one of them on the side of the road, never to be seen again.
Readers, there were two children and one stroller.
At the time, a friend with an older kid said that when you have a baby, your brain becomes something resembling pieces of broken styrofoam floating on water and you’re forever trying to piece it back together.
And that was one of the truest things ever spoken.
So when we read the title of this study from the prestigious Monash University – Baby brain? Evidence for no objective cognitive differences between mothers, fathers and non-parents in the post-partum period – we were a little sceptical. Gobsmacked, even.
“Evidence supporting an objective cognitive decline in the postpartum period is unconvincing,” the researchers wrote in the journal Cortex.
The researchers tested 300 parents and 100 non-parents to assess their executive function, working and episodic memory, processing speed and subjective memory.
“Parents showed similar performance to non-parent controls on all objective cognition measures, and we found evidence for no differences in cognitive performance between mothers and fathers, suggesting the absence of so-called ‘baby brain’ effects,” they wrote.
What’s stranger is that there were no changes in the parents’ cognitive ability over the two-year period, even when they were presumably – but not always – getting more sleep as their babies grew into toddlerhood.
The group that had the best scores, however, were the male non-parents, who self-reported better subjective memory than all other groups.
“A commonly shown phenomenon in males, this self-promotion bias appeared to be lost in fathers, an effect driven by lack of sleep,” the researchers noted.
Co-lead researcher Dr Kelsey Perrykkad said the phenomena of baby brain was more related to poor sleep than a “true objective decline in cognition”.
“New parents can take solace in the fact that becoming a new parent doesn’t inherently impair their memory and cognition,” she said.
After your scribe shared her disbelief, colleagues suggested a possible explanation.
That is, parents devoted all their cognitive resources towards doing the test, only to walk out of the university and promptly lock their keys in the car, then go home and forget what they were saying.
In fairness to the researchers, your scribe’s absent-mindedness mostly came down to sleep deprivation, and perhaps if we had been asked to complete cognition tests in a nice comfy room at a university, we would have done ok – and then asked for a quiet place to lie down.
But God help researchers if any of them suggests that there’s no brain fog in perimenopause.
Send memory exercises to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
