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Pregnancy Brain: Myth or Reality?

New research casts doubt, but most new moms beg to differ.

By Denise Mann
WebMD Feature

Reviewed by Renee A. Alli, MD, FAAP

Nipping Pregnancy Brain in the Bud

Bena Blakeslee, a mother of two in Westchester, N.Y., remembers her brush with "pregnancy brain."

At an airport while pregnant, she frantically paced a parking lot, searching for her Jeep. After an hour, she called her husband to tell him that their car had been stolen. But then she realized that she had just gone to the wrong parking lot.

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That wasn't her only memory glitch. "I also went to the wrong airport twice on the same trip, and another time, I was sitting at the wrong gate and completely missed my flight," Blakeslee says.

Many pregnant women and mothers can relate. Those bouts of forgetfulness go by many names, including:

pregnancy brain
mommy brain
pregnancy amnesia
momnesia

But a recent study questions whether pregnancy brain exists. Who is right -- the moms or the researchers? And how can you handle fuzzy memory during pregnancy? Here are answers.

Pregnancy Brain Is Real

"If you read pregnancy manuals and listen to pregnant mothers – yes, there is such a thing as pregnancy brain or momnesia, and there is also evidence from research showing deficits in memory," says Helen Christensen, PhD, of The Australian National University.

But "the evidence from our study shows that the capacity of the brain is unaltered in pregnancy," Christensen tells WebMD in an email.

That is, a pregnant woman's brain is unchanged, though she may not be as razor sharp as she once was.

Reasons for Pregnancy Brain

Blakeslee's forgetfulness is understandable. Like many moms, her life swirls like a tornado. She constantly handles the needs and wants of her two young kids, a torrent of other household tasks and chores -- and she rarely, if ever, gets a good night's sleep.

Under these circumstances, it is 100% normal to have memory lapses or be forgetful, Christenson says.

Jane Martin, assistant professor of psychiatry and director of the Neuropsychological Testing and Evaluation Center at New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center, agrees.

"When you are not getting enough sleep and are multitasking, nobody's memory is good," Martin says. "You are not cognitively sharp when you haven't slept well."

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