Something that happens to many women when we become mothers, we notice that we become a little ... distracted. This is known as mummies or the 'amnesia of mothers', and it is something that we experience since pregnancy, when our short-term memory begins to fail, due to all the hormonal changes that we live and that produce changes in brain activity.
But these changes in the brain also bring good things. A new study found that when you think of your children, your memory improves. We tell you why.
Performed by researchers at Binghamton University and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, the study analyzed the different ways in which the evolutionary process affects human memory.
They took place tests on participants to assess their ability to remember a series of words and they were asked to imagine that they were in ancient grasslands of Africa. Because evolution and natural selection prioritize things like having babies and survival, it was not surprising to find that it was easier to remember details and information related to them.
When the tests were related to parenting, it was found that the ability to remember the series of words improved. According to the study, the reason why this happened is because memory was experiencing a kind of thrust or acceleration, similar to what happened when they were presented with a scenario or survival situation.
This would suggest that our brains work better and harder to remember important information when it comes to protecting or caring for our children. Ralph Miller, one of the study authors and professor of psychology, explains the following in an interview for Psych Central: "Our ability to think and memorize information comes from our nervous systems. Because these are a product of evolution and past experiences, one can expect that how well we memorize something today is influenced by the natural selection that happened with our ancestors a long time ago.".
Maybe in the day to day we still have a bit of that mummies and let's forget basic things like the place where we left the keys or where we came to the room. But when it comes to our survival instinct and the upbringing and care of our children, our brain works better.
