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01/15/2006:
"Want to boost your brain power? Just have a baby"
It is a time of sleep deprivation, constant tiredness and a regular inability to carry out even the simplest task. But now scientists have discovered - after experimenting on the California deer mouse, laboratory rats, and humans - that pregnancy also confers startling benefits: it actually boosts brainpower.During pregnancy, learning and memory skills improve dramatically, say researchers, reversing the popular myth that it is a time of dumbing down. Key brain areas also alter in size; changes that can persist for decades. Far from transforming mothers into weakened emotional wrecks who lose car keys and drop in IQ, it turns out having children makes them cleverer. It's just hard to spot thanks to all that lost sleep.
'Many benefits seem to emerge from motherhood, as the maternal brain rises to the reproductive challenge,' says Professor Craig Kinsley, of Richmond University, and Professor Kelly Lambert, of Randolph-Macon College, both in Virginia, writing in the latest Scientific American. 'In other words, when the going gets tough, the brain gets going.'
guardian.co.uk
