‘Baby brain.’

We've all said it. We've all had it said to us, usually with a little pat on the head and a ‘bless her.’ In this episode, I'm calling it out for what it actually is - a lazy, patronising insult dressed up as a joke, and I'm bringing the neuroscience to prove it.

Because here's the thing, while we've been told for decades that pregnancy turns our brains to mush, the research tells a completely different story. Your brain isn't declining when you become a mother. It's being rebuilt to make you a more attuned, more responsive, more brilliant version of yourself. And yet less than 0.5% of all brain imaging studies since the 1990s have looked at women's health at all, let alone what happens to the maternal brain.

We'll go to the moon before we'll properly fund research into what happens to the woman who just grew a human from scratch.

In this episode:

• Why "baby brain" isn't cognitive decline, it's a biological transformation
• The landmark 2025 Nature Neuroscience study that MRI-scanned one woman's brain 26 times across pregnancy and postpartum, and what it found
• What's actually happening inside your brain - the pruning process fine-tuning you to your baby and why it explains everything from letdown reflexes to picking your baby's cry out of a crowd
• The 2025 study showing measurable grey matter changes in first-time mothers and the areas of the brain it affects, including memory and decision-making
• Why mothering today is harder than ever, according to trauma expert Dr Gabor Maté, and what that's got to do with a brain that's already working overtime
• The uncomfortable stat on maternal mental health that should be front-page news, and isn't
• The surprising long-term upside - what having a baby might do for your brain decades down the line

If you've ever felt stupid, foggy, or less than since having a baby, this one's for you. Because you didn't lose your edge. Your brain did something extraordinary, and it's about time we started talking about it that way.

MOTHERS’ HOOD

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Welcome to You've Had a Baby, Not a Lobotomy, with me, Samantha Murrell. This is a podcast where we disrupt the narratives around what it means to be a good mother. No experts, no tips and tricks, no textbooks, and no judgement. We're all navigating motherhood alongside everything else happening in our own lives. So consider this your invitation to question everything that you've been told about motherhood and then do it your own damn way.

Hello and welcome to this solo episode of You've Had a Baby, Not a Lobotomy. And in this episode, we are going to be talking about why we need to stop calling it baby brain and using it really as an insult to pregnant women.

We've all heard it ourselves and we might have even used the term and phrase ourselves. I mean, I think I probably have, before I knew better, but I remember being pregnant and having those comments from people when you forget a word or your brain feels a bit foggy — "baby brain" — you know, being treated like we're stupid, we're less capable. And it's almost like a little pat on the head, like, "oh, baby brain."

That's really why the podcast is called You've Had a Baby, Not a Lobotomy, because we are often treated as if we have suddenly become stupid when we have a baby. There's this collective feeling of mothers suddenly becoming less than. I was actually reading an article — sounding tin about a guy who was talking about mums at the school gate. Like, "oh, even mums at the school gate are using AI to run their households and their side hustles." And, sorry, what the fuck. You know, it is just pervasive in all areas of life.

When we're using language like this, and I know this seems like silly, silly little jokes, and, "oh, we can't say anything now, can we, without offending people" — the thing is, it's the connotations behind it that create that feeling. And it's those things that build up over and over. We hear little things like that and then we start to believe it ourselves.

I certainly felt it myself, and I see it with the women that I work with and the women that I speak with on a daily basis. We often feel less capable than before because we couldn't do things at the same speed as before, or we can't retain as much information as before. We're having to write everything down from meetings.

At this time in our lives — during pregnancy, when we become a new mum, when we're transitioning back to work, and even later in life — we're holding so many things in our heads. During pregnancy, we are literally growing another human being, and I think we forget this sometimes. We literally grow another organ — the placenta is another organ, and it creates its own hormones, feeds the baby, and takes away all the waste products.

So I think we forget how monumental this transformation of becoming a mother is, and also the physical aspects of growing a baby, because it really, really is monumental. And we need to remember how monumental it is. Yes, it's a "natural" thing — I've put that in inverted commas — because we are biologically programmed to reproduce, but it is still really, really amazing.

I actually wrote some content recently about the Artemis 2 journey — going around the moon. And whilst I really loved the feel-good hype around it, and there were some really beautiful stories that came out of it, it made me reflect on the lack of interest we have in things that are actually happening closer to home. The things we don't know about the human body and the human brain, versus the amount of money and time we spend going outside our planet and into outer space — it was 4.1 billion spent on that mission alone.

And you think, well, we can't even support the mothers that we have. We can't even support the next generation coming through properly, because when we don't support mothers, we're not supporting children. I'm not saying those things are mutually exclusive, but I think it's very much skewed in the wrong direction. This is evidenced by the lack of research into, number one, women's health full stop, and number two, into maternal health, maternal brain, and maternal wellbeing.

So something seemingly small can have such massive connotations on how a person feels about themselves, how society feels about those people, how society looks after those people, how they value those people. And I say this time and time again — motherhood is just not valued. It's not valued for the time, the effort, the emotional effort, or the amount of love that we pour into our children. We do it because we love our children and because we want to, but mothers are overwhelmed and exhausted because we just keep giving, giving, giving — and mothers are breaking.

I wanted to get into a bit of the research about what happens to a woman's brain — physically what happens to her, but really what happens to her brain when she is growing a baby. There is so much more we have to learn on this, but there are some really interesting studies, and this explains what happens to the brain and why we need to get rid of the term "baby brain" and the way it's currently used — as, quite honestly, insulting and infantilising to women.

The observations captured by the researchers showed reductions in cortical grey matter volume and cortical thickness occurring in line with advancing gestational week. So it happened gradually as the baby grew, alongside the dramatic rise in sex hormone production. They also saw significant evidence of remodelling within subcortical structures, including the caudate, thalamus, putamen and hippocampus.

There's also something that gets missed in this: there was a pronounced decrease in grey matter and cortical thickness evident across the brain, in contrast to increases in white matter microstructural integrity, ventricular volume and cerebrospinal fluid. There are a lot of scientific names in there, but essentially what is happening is a pruning of the brain. Imagine a rose bush — you prune it to make it flourish more densely and become more effective. So it's fine-tuning the maternal brain to be more in tune with her baby.

For example, the physiological response you feel when your baby cries — your milk can actually start letting down when you hear your baby crying. That can happen for other babies too, but we are really attuned to our own baby's specific cries. There have also been studies on babies being in different rooms from their mothers, and the mothers can pick out their own baby's specific cry and specific noises. This is really important for maternal-baby bonding.

So the mother becomes more finely attuned to her baby, and that's part of why it can take fathers a lot longer to bond with their babies in the same way mothers do — because mothers have been doing this for over nine months, and their brain has literally, physiologically changed and pruned to become more attuned to it. Effectively, it makes mothers more efficient in their caregiving and more responsive to the baby, which increases bonding and attachment, and that's directly correlated to the baby's health and wellbeing outcomes.

So we can actually see that the MRI studies are showing a reduction in these areas that affect memory. Hence why sometimes we can't quite grasp those words — no pun intended. I remember there were certain words I couldn't quite grasp, or my brain just felt foggy, and I didn't remember things as well as I used to. I remember being really, really frustrated about this and trying to play it down. I remember so many friends saying about themselves, "oh, it's just baby brain," "my silly baby brain." I really want to reframe this culture of treating women like they've become stupid.

There are so many other benefits that we know about too. Physically, these brain changes have actually been linked to benefits in protecting against ageing and pathology. I saw a study recently which showed that women who have babies over the age of 40 are more likely to have strong health well into their hundreds.

So I know we hear quite a few negative things about pregnancy and having children — how it makes you tired, sleep-deprived, and so on. But actually, it's so much more complex than that. These studies are really interesting in showing what is literally happening in the brain, and how it's driven by hormones, and the brilliant way it gets us to attune with our baby. That's really to do with survival and attachment.

So I just want to emphasise the fact that it's a biological transformation. It's not a cognitive decline. So, for the love of God, can we stop using "baby brain" — especially in the way it's used to infantilise women with that patronising pat on the head — and instead honour it as a really brilliant process by which we become more attuned to looking after our babies and being brilliant mothers.

Thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'd love to hear what you thought about my thoughts on trying to exile the word "baby brain" and getting people to understand what actually happens when we become a mother.

Thank you for listening to this episode. If anything really resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify, or come and find me in my DMs on Instagram — you'll find everything you need to connect with me in the show notes. And if you're looking for more structured support as you navigate motherhood identity or returning to work, you can find more about how I can support you through these seasons in your life there too.

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You've been listening to You've Had a Baby, Not a Lobotomy, with me, Samantha Murrell. This is an independent podcast produced by Decibel Creative.