Congratulations to Isobel Cohen, 33, who has just graduated from Cambridge University with first-class honors in English — taking her exams 28 hours after having a baby. She sat papers on practical criticism and Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedies in a hospital dressing gown and slippers.
Now that the results are in and baby Beatrice is six weeks old, it is just slightly annoying that Cohen is back-pedaling from her achievement with the standard cliches about “mumnesia.”
“I wonder how I held it together and got through them because now I’m into full-blown ‘nappy brain,’” she said
“While my concentration and memory were not as good as they might have been, I could still do things I needed to do and retain enough information to write decent essays,” she said.
Experts disagree about how childbirth affects intellectual ability. A 2010 study by the US National Institute of Mental Health found that new moms’ brains “bulk up as they cope with the new demands babies bring.”
They scanned the brains of 19 mothers and a comparison of images taken two to four weeks before birth and three to four months after, showed a significant increase in brain growth.
On the other hand, higher levels of estrogen and progesterone in pregnancy are thought to have a negative effect on the parts of the brain governing spatial memory.
What about the benign idiocy we think of as “preg head?” That is most likely down to sleep deprivation, which would not have kicked at the time Cohen sat her papers.
The most interesting part of this story? That her achievement has been reported as an extraordinary mental feat. When what she did physically was a million times more impressive.
“I was sitting in a hospital room in my gown, attached to a catheter. It was painful,” she said.
First in English? No sweat. Sitting on a chair for three hours? Give this person a medal.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
In front of a secluded temple in southwestern China, Duan Ruru skillfully executes a series of chops and strikes, practicing kung fu techniques she has spent a decade mastering. Chinese martial arts have long been considered a male-dominated sphere, but a cohort of Generation Z women like Duan is challenging that assumption and generating publicity for their particular school of kung fu. “Since I was little, I’ve had a love for martial arts... I thought that girls learning martial arts was super swaggy,” Duan, 23, said. The ancient Emei school where she trains in the mountains of China’s Sichuan Province
RSS