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.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script, in part a legacy of French colonial rule. The history of romanized Vietnamese, or Quoc Ngu, links the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, colonization by the French and the rise to power of the Communist Party of Vietnam. It is now reflected in the country’s “bamboo diplomacy” approach of seeking strength through flexibility, or looking to stay on good terms with the world’s major powers. A month after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited,
RSS