We have all heard of Pregnancy Brain, right? It’s the phenomenon where, when you are pregnant, you seem to be more forgetful or flighty than your usual self. Once the baby is born, we start calling it Baby Brain, and it usually lasts until Mommy can get a full night’s sleep on a regular basis.

I read an article today on Pregnancy and Newborn Magazine’s website (www.pnmag.com) which cites an Australian study in which 1,200 women were followed over three four-year intervals for eight years. During that time, 264 of them got pregnant, yet those women showed no cognitive differences from their non-pregnant peers. Does that seem right to you?

I can personally attest to being more forgetful during pregnancy, from losing things to doing things twice to walking into a room and them wondering what I had gone there for. But, according to the researcher doing this study, I was no more or less out of it while pregnant than I was before. Her theory is that we are conditioned to blame it on being pregnant, so we do! I will agree that she has the right to draw that conclusion, but I suspect that the pregnant women who were  tested probably left their keys in the bathroom on the way out of the building and then forgot to stop at the grocery before going home. :) Plus, don’t you focus better when you KNOW you’re being tested than when you’re just living life?

And I dare say that in month two or three, when those Mommies were exhausted from lack of sleep, they were claiming Baby Brain, even if Pregancy Brain was just a figment of their imagination. What do you think?