Pregnancy actually changes your brain, study says

“Mommy brain” is a phrase typically used to describe a mother who is absentminded or forgetful, typically right after a pregnancy.

A new study shows mommy brain could be a real phenomenon, but it has nothing to do with being forgetful.

The study, published in Nature Neuroscience on Monday, found pregnancy actually alters the mind of mothers, typically for at least two years after pregnancy. Changes include the decrease of gray matter in the brain, primarily located in regions involved in social processes, which indicates that the brain changes are meant to help women with the transition into motherhood by making them more easily attached to their children, according to the study’s authors.

“The regions of GM change affected by pregnancy are known to play a role in social cognition, and a visual inspection of the observed GM volume changes suggested a strong similarity to the theory-of-mind network,” the study states.

The theory-of-mind network refers to social skills, including the ability to infer people’s thoughts and feelings. That part of the brain also responded strongly during testing that involved showing mothers pictures of their own babies versus pictures of other babies.

The study took 25 women who wanted to become pregnant for the first time and used an MRI scan on their brains both before and after they were pregnant. It compared those results to 20 women who had never been pregnant, 19 first-time fathers and 17 men without any children.

The changes were so consistent in first-time mothers that an algorithm could correctly classify brains as recently pregnant or not without fail. There were no differences between women who became pregnant by natural conception and those who underwent fertility treatments.

During pregnancy, the brain of new mothers “undergoes a further maturation or specialization” in the parts of the brain related to social skills and empathy, the authors concluded.

So what about the previous conception of mommy brain, and new mothers being forgetful? The authors say “no significant changes were observed across sessions,” when testing new mothers’ cognitive abilities before and after their pregnancies.

This story was originally published December 19, 2016 at 12:11 PM with the headline "Pregnancy actually changes your brain, study says."