You walk into the kitchen and forget why you’re there. You put the milk in the pantry and the keys in the fridge. You lose your train of thought halfway through a sentence.

If you’ve recently had a baby, you might blame all this on “baby brain” – that foggy, forgetful feeling so many new mothers describe.

But is “baby brain” real? Does the brain really change during pregnancy? And if so, how’s all this related to how new mothers think?

Yes, pregnancy can reshape the brain

Pregnancy reshapes the brain in quite dramatic ways. In fact, we can tell if someone has been pregnant by looking at their brain structure.

There are changes in the brain’s grey matter volume. These are in regions that control complex thinking, mood and “social cognition”, or our ability to understand the needs and wants of others.

These changes are long-lasting. They’ve been detected in women six years after birth. Large-scale population studies have even shown this grey matter signature of pregnancy decades later.

More recently, a remarkable study scanned one woman 26 times from before conception through to two years after birth, to map these changes........

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