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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Poverty Taxes The Brain
This understanding of the brains bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time....
In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire nights sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference thats been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.
Full Article: [link]http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/[/link]
As someone who in the past has spent many years with the psychic burden of worrying about meeting basic needs haunting him day and night, this very much rings true.
annabanana
(52,791 posts)"No DUH" to the chattering classes.
Poverty is an all encompassing, totally exhausting, completely enervating condition. It is the hardest job there is.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)devils chaplain
(602 posts)adirondacker
(2,921 posts)orpupilofnature57
(15,472 posts)jwirr
(39,215 posts)to school hungry.
CrispyQ
(36,509 posts)while Wall St. loots the treasury to pay for martini lunches. I don't think I've ever seen such perverted values as this country has. No money to care for our citizens, but we're about to start another war & how to pay for it isn't even mentioned. I cannot remember being this disgusted with our political system.
valerief
(53,235 posts)again and nothing will come of it. Well, except that, those who don't need tax dollars get them and those who do need tax dollars won't. More of the same. The research was probably commissioned by the .01% to ensure their plan of human enslavement is working as designed.