The neuroscience of inequality: does poverty show up in children's brains? | Inequality... - 0 views
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The Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab is home to cutting-edge research on how poverty affects young brains, and I’ve come here to learn how Noble and her colleagues could soon definitively prove that growing up poor can keep a child’s brain from developing.
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handful of neuroscientists and pediatricians who’ve seen increasing evidence that poverty itself – and not factors like nutrition, language exposure, family stability, or prenatal issues, as previously thought – may diminish the growth of a child’s brain.
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Prior to their study, scientists had never investigated the specific cognitive tasks (face learning, picture learning, vocabulary tests) in which poor children underperformed, let alone mapped out how their brain structure and development might differ.
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The results, which Noble and Farah reported in a 2005 paper, were the beginning of what they call a “neurocognitive profile” of socioeconomic status and the developing brain. Farah, Noble and other scientists soon began using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to examine the brains of children across the socioeconomic spectrum.
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The results were striking. In one study, Farah looked at 283 MRIs and found that kids from poorer, less-educated families tended to have thinner subregions of the prefrontal cortex – a part of the brain strongly associated with executive functioning – than better-off kids. That could explain weaker academic achievement and even lower IQs.
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What’s more, the data indicated that small increases in family income had a much larger impact on the brains of the poorest children than similar increases among wealthier children. And Noble’s data also suggested that when a family falls below a certain basic level of income, brain growth drops off precipitously. Children from families making less than $25,000 suffered the most, with 6% less brain surface area than peers in families making $150,000 or more.
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It’s really a shame for this field that Hillary Clinton’s not our president Martha Farah These studies indicate it isn’t one specific factor that’s solely responsible for diminishing brain growth and intellectual potential, but rather the larger environment of poverty.