Blame this guy, ladies. not me.
Do women temporarily get stupider when they have a baby? My wife thought so about her two births; so did my two daughters who have had children, and they tell me that all the other mothers they know think so, too. Now, as science marches on, it appears that it really is true. Jessica Henry and Barbara Sherwin have an article in the forthcoming issue of Behavioral Neuroscience reporting that women in late pregnancy and soon after birth had significantly lower scores than a control group on a variety of cognitive tasks, and conclude that changes in the levels of cortisol and estradiol may be involved.
“It’s nature’s way of hosing down the mind,” a family friend explained it to my wife when she was caring for her three-week-old and complaining that she had lost her brains. And when you think about it, what better way to help a new mother cope with the infinite demands of an infant on her life?
Is it motherhood that makes some of these protestors think that annoying people on the street without a defined purpose is “changing the world”? What are the rest of these peoples excuses then?
