A new study seems to confirm what exhausted parents have long suspected but may have been too tired to articulate: Lack of sleep turns the brain to mush. More precisely, waking up too frequently prevents the brain from forming new memories. Although these results come from a study of mice, some sleep-deprived mothers -- including the study’s author -- say the findings ring true. Sleep researcher Asya Rolls, like many mothers, suffered from “momnesia,” the mental fog that sets in shortly after delivery and may continue until youngsters sleep consistently through the night. “I can remember my children as babies, but it’s a very hazy memory, based mostly on photographs and videos,” says Rolls, a researcher at Stanford University and co-author of a study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
