Memory and Motherhood: Is It Better Than What We Think?

When talking about motherhood and the brain, often the first thing that comes to mind is the idea that motherhood is accompanied by a deficit in memory performance. This is something that is referred as Baby Brain, Mommy Brain, Mom Brain, or Momnesia. Over the past 3 or 4 decades, an increased awareness of this phenomenon has become evident in pop culture and social media with numerous anecdotes about how being pregnant and having a child makes a birthing parents' brain go to “mush” for months, if not years. But is this true?

The rather sparse research on this topic has yet to confirm the extent and duration of these memory deficits with motherhood. Recent research by Orchard et al., in this issue, ¹ revisits the question of memory changes with motherhood and investigates memory at 1-year postpartum.

Before I get into the study findings, I want to clearly state that if the majority of mothers report memory deficits during pregnancy and the postpartum period, there is something to this. ² It is important to determine where and when these memory changes occur and the factors linked to them—factors that can include sleep deprivation, lack of support, changes in mood, to name a few. If the majority of fathers complained of memory deficits, I am sure we would have the answers as to why already.

The study by Orchard et al. investigated subjective and objective memory in a cohort of mothers (1 year postpartum) and nonmothers: against a backdrop of well-being measures such as sleep, anxiety, and depression, something that is not always investigated in motherhood and memory research. The findings show that mothers and nonmothers do not differ on objective memory tasks. However, mothers rate their memory as poorer and are better at predicting their memory performance than nonmothers. In addition, in mothers, but not nonmothers, poorer scores of well-being were related to poorer subjective memory.

What Orchard et al. found adds to growing body of literature showing that mothers and nonmothers rarely differ in objective memory tests, or do so at a fairly subtle level during pregnancy and the early postpartum period, ^3,4 although their feelings about their memory performance differ significantly. Why is this so? A couple of thoughts come to mind. First of all, moms are brought into the laboratory, to a quiet setting with minimal distractions, and asked to complete a series of questionnaires. They are not juggling their day-to-day demands and a child or children. This begs the question of whether we should be testing memory in moms in their home environment: a place that is more ecologically relevant. To my knowledge, only one study has done this. Cuttler et al. showed that pregnant and nonpregnant women performed well on memory tasks in the laboratory, but when participants were asked to remember to do something from home (i.e., send in some forms a week after the laboratory visit), the pregnant people did significantly worse on this task. ⁵

In addition to the setting of testing (laboratory versus home), which implies a difference in distractibility or cognitive load, the idea of a sociocultural and historical context at play here is starting to come to light; as pointed out in Orchard et al. For decades, if not centuries, females have been perceived as the weaker gender, as being less capable intellectually and being created for the goal of making babies.

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, a leading writer of the Victorian era, wrote the following in Adam Bede, “That's the way with these women—they've got no head-pieces to nourish, and so their food all runs either to fat or to brats.” ⁶ It is interesting how we still have memes today about our brains going to our brats—“I used to have functioning brain cells but I traded them in for children,” a popular meme on the internet (source unknown).

Of course, Eliot's sentiment was written in a novel and may have been added for flare, but there is a long history of women just not being smart enough and having the capacity for love above all else. With this historical context and the increased talk of Mom Brain may be there is an element of “if you believe it you will see it.” Instead of focusing on the improvements in memory with motherhood such as visual memory, ⁷ memory for baby-specific things, ⁸ or the amazing ability to identify your newborn by touch, ⁹ the narrative of motherhood and memory stays the same because that is what we know, that is what history has told us.

One thing we cannot deny is that the idea that mothers are not smart (or smart enough) has trickled down into our societies and our unconscious. This needs to change. We need to reassess, revisit, and rebrand Mom Brain to include the incredible accomplishments that our brain (and body) achieves when we produce a human.