New mothers who feel foggy and distracted in the first months aren’t losing their sharpness — brain scans show measurable grey-matter changes in the exact regions used to read another person’s mind, changes still visible two years later, tuned, the evidence suggests, to one specific person who can’t talk yet

The foggy feeling new mothers report isn't cognitive decline—it's a fundamental rewiring of the brain's social-perception circuits, changes so specific and persistent that neuroscientists can now see them on scans years later.