Pregnancy brain is real, lasting - and probably good for baby

At some point in the course of pregnancy, a woman is likely to suspect that the baby she is incubating has somehow hijacked her brain. New research suggests that, in some sense, she's right, and that pregnancy itself is altering her brain like no other experience she's had since adolescence. The places where a pregnant woman's brain shrinks are very specific, the research says. The structural renovations wrought by pregnancy appear to overlap almost perfectly with the brain regions that play a key role in how we understand and interpret the actions, intentions and feelings of others. And the brain of a first-time mother stays changed -- for at least two years after she has given birth, according to the new research, published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Pregnant women did not lose intellectual ground, the researchers found: as a group, their working memory and memory for words was no better or worse than before pregnancy.