Q: "I've just had a baby and I seem to be forgetting everything. Is this normal and will my memory ever improve?"

A: Human memory researcher, John Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: "Being more forgetful is normal and your memory will improve.

"As a first-time father, I appreciate the challenges of motherhood. There's little specific evidence about why mothers experience memory problems (perhaps because they're quite busy and not volunteering for memory research). But we can relate these experiences to what we know about memory.

"Mothers face a lot of sleep deprivation for a prolonged period and fatigue harms memory in many ways. Sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation, the process by which events of the day are fixed into long-term memory (we may even replay our experiences of the day while we sleep).

"This is also an exciting but stressful period, with concerns about pregnancy, the physical stress of delivery and the complete responsibility to care for an infant. Stress is another enemy of memory. Stress-related hormones have a particularly toxic effect on a brain structure called the hippocampus, which is essential for making memories.

"It's likely that hormonal changes are part of the story too. But mothers regain their memory - and one study found that although brains appear to shrink during pregnancy, they rebound by six months."