How the brain changes during pregnancy

'Baby brain' has some scientific basis but not in the way we first thought

Mother and baby
The brain undergoes a 'sweeping reorganisation' when a woman is expecting a baby
(Image credit: fizkes / Shutterstock)

So many things change for a woman during pregnancy – and one of them could be her brain.

New research suggests that "mommy brain" could be "a real thing", said The Washington Post, but the process is quite at odds with the "pop culture conception" of young mothers becoming "cognitively fuzzy and absent-minded".

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  Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.