Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

[The Straight Story]

Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

Growing up poor isn't merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.

"Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement," wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.

At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They've found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school. Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/poordevelopment.html

[tabatha]

1. Thanks for that.

If one reads the book "Kaffir Boy", one learns that many living in the townships before 1994 went without food not for just a day but sometimes a week. Hence the problems in that country today.

Also, the food often given to domestic help was bad - white bread, white sugar, etc.

[Double T]

2. Every citizen should have the opportunity to make a decent living wage.

wall street, corporate america and their greed mongering investors will make certain it does not happen.

[sam sarrha]

5. that isn't possible when less than 2% loots over 80% of the wealth, an the media spreads that

Socialism is the earths deadliest Poison..

[Double T]

6. The reign of terror by the wealthy will soon end when the masses........

have finally had enough.

[sam sarrha]

11. is that why there is all the talk about restricting guns..?? i never got the story in straight talk.

i definitely intend to upgrade the Caliber of my home security system, in case it all falls apart, like the ReThugs want it to.

[Double T]

13. The Second Amendment is secure; the founders put it there for a damn good reason.

I'm partial to clubs, torches and hand to hand combat. Peace doesn't work when we're dealing with the ruthless criminals of wall street and corporate america. Almost time to get a few more lessons and pointers from Jack Bauer.

[sam sarrha]

19. i'm more worried right now about the junkies down the street..

[Double T]

23. The junkies aren't going to wipe out our entire nation, as well as others.

[sam sarrha]

24. the nation is gone ..belly up, we're screwed, they wont do what is required, when

Obama started this BullShit about 'Bipartisan', i knew it was over. they fucked it up for a reason.. they wont let us fix it.. they only want to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic

if we don't nationalize the energy industry, use the profits to fund the solar/wind solution to end fossil energy as a fuel.. we will destroy the earth, we need to prepare for that disaster.

we need to end this economic system and start a socialist system to prevent the oligarchs from doing this again.

when the food riots begin i want to be able to protect my family from looters, i was in Africa in drought relief in 73, i have seen what it looks like.. few people in this country have a clue whats going to happen.. i've seen scores of dead people in the street in the morning.. the donkey carts picked em up at dawn.. starvation disease becomes a daily horror.. even if you are lucky enough not to be hungry

[Double T]

25. Couch potato americans don't have a clue of what is to come, you are absolutely right.

If being screwed by the wall street and corporate america doesn't motivate THEM, scarcity of food sure as hell will. It will be a very ugly scene. On the rest, I stand in solidarity with you; it doesn't matter which political party holds office.

[ddeclue]

3. How about less parent-child interaction because of an increased need to work?

and if the parent is less educated they will be less able to educate their child is another possible explanation.

[geiger]

4. From growing up in poverty, but not extreme, I can relate to this myself

it's a miracle I escaped.

Now, back to my statistics homework. My brain is definitely a bit rusty, at best.

[ulysses]

7. from the department of no shit...

K&R.

[riverdeep]

8. This was really brought home to me while listing to the excellent Radiolab

series on the thymus gland. I found a blog posting from someone that had the same reaction I did and tells it better than I, so I'll let them tell it:

At some point in the later 19th century, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome was identified as a problem (although it was called by different names). When doctors autopsied babies who had died from SIDS, they found that their thymus glands were larger than average. So, thinking that the thymus was obstructing the airway and causing the child's death, they figured out a way to shrink the thymus of any living children they identified who had an enlarged one. Doing so would prevent the child from dying of SIDS, they believed. And what was the method they came up with for shrinking the thymus? Direct radiation in pretty high doses.

I didn't hear how much this "treatment" was carried out, but from looking around on the web it looks like it went on between 1900 and 1950. Of course, we now know that the children who got their thymus irradiated were much more likely to develop cancer twenty or thirty years later.

But if that was the whole story, I wouldn't be writing about it. Believe it or not, it actually gets worse.

Get this... back in the 19th century when medical students first were able to dissect cadavers as part of their studies, the bodies they acquired (at first illegally, as described so well in the novel The Dress Lodger) were predominantly those of poor people -- in fact, at some point around mid-century the bodies of people who died paupers were turned over by law to medical schools. Based on many autopsies over the years, the average size of the thymus was determined and recorded for use in physiology classes.

But what no one realized for a hundred years or so was that the thymus gland's size is affected by stress, and that these poor, beaten down people who ended up as paupers whose bodies were indentured to science had abnormally small thymus.

So when the SIDS babies were autopsied, their thymus glands seemed as though they were enlarged -- but they were actually normal, healthy thymuses.

http://daughternumberthree.blogspot.com/2008/11/disturbing-case-of-shrinking-thyroid.html

And here is the original radiolab peice:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/12/05
(go to the last peice, "How to cure what ails you" the story starts at 10:14)

[nashville_brook]

17. i love Radiolab. thanks for this link -- haven't heard this one.

[sam sarrha]

9. i grew up poor. rats, fleas, Free Holiness Pentecostals, a drunken father that beat me daily, i was

about to get my degree in Biology when Reagan became Governor, ended the small foreign tariffs that provided free college education in California, i had to drop out, i was going to Humboldt State living in a attic in Arcata CA with 6 other people, sleeping in sleeping bags at the time. it took 26 years to begin fixing the damage Reagan did to the educational system in California. at the time i dropped out of collage it was said that after the first 4 months od Reagan's Governorship if he resigned it would take 20 years to fix the damage he caused

i have an IQ of 164, ended up driving a tractor and digging holes the next 12 years. i finally get 6 years in Aerospace Technology, Teamsters union.. and the Stupid Wet Brain alcoholic, drug addict, Narsissy, AWOL draft dodger son of a Mafia Don... FUCKS UP THE WHOLE GOD DAMNED WORLD, and still just might manage to end civilization as we know it.

[riverdeep]

21. Yeah, that's what I find myself saying,

"This guy actually managed to break the whole world". That is some kind of an accomplishment in itself.

For a small moment, small because it's too depressing, I wonder what would have happened had Gore got in...

[SoCalDem]

10. If you are 5 years old, and know better than to ask for food

because you KNOW there's none to be had...or you know that Mom is always in a bad mood, you are not likely to "do well in school"..

It's just that simple

[sam sarrha]

18. many times we only had white bread and cheap margarine, or elbow macaroni some veggie oil and salt,

i went thru the garbage cans at school and collected food for the family.. there was sometimes food in the dumpsters behind grocery stores. Chinese restaurants threw out rice and veggies, dried egg rolls, we had to be careful dad didn't find out we were eating someone else's garbage, he'd rather we eat our own garbage after he wasted all the money on booze. he got a little better later in life, he apologized before he died

i was born in 1949, i discovered people threw away food in the first grade, whole wrapped sandwiches, apples all kinds of fruit. i tied a sleeve of my coat closed at the cuff, dropped it into the sleeve while picking thru the cans when everybody went out to play after lunch. folded the loot into the folds of the coat, carried it home.. my mother wasn't happy but she knew we were hungry. i'm sure it broke her heart.

i also took books out of the higher grades borrowed them for a while, took em back, got some more, i never learned anything "in" school. i learned to read at 3, listening while hiding under the table while my parents helped my older brother with his lessons, then sneaking the books and figuring out what they were doing.

i learned 'Sneaking' early in life, if i did anything in the open i got a severe beating for it.. that is another negative about poverty, the suffering of children and women at the hands of drug addicts and drunks

[ulysses]

12. the question is this:

What the fuck are we going to do about it?

[Mithreal]

14. Thom Hartmann has done seem really good interviews on this topic.

http://www.thomhartmann.com/2008/02/19/february-18-2008-show-notes/

Article: Poverty mars formation of infant brains.
"Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain, the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston heard on Friday.

Neuroscientists said many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development. That effect is on top of any damage caused by inadequate nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins.

Studies by several US universities have revealed the pervasive harm done to the brain, particularly between the ages of six months and three years, from low socio-economic status.

Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s centre for cognitive neuroscience, said: “The biggest effects are on language and memory. The finding about memory impairment – the ability to encounter a pattern and remember it – really surprised us.”"

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/62c45126-dc1f-11dc-bc82-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

[TBF]

15. K&R n/t

[nashville_brook]

16. other stressors associated with poverty: addiction, mental illness, neglect and abuse

or perhaps these are the stressors referred to.

[santamargarita]

20. I just came from Wired and read the entire article...

and was sickened...

[riverdeep]

22. I think stories like this go against something we find deeply American.

And you know, in some ways it's not a bad thing at all, this belief we have of being able to rise above our given station. It's what separated us from where we came from, our native countries.

But the reality may be more bleak. We have little to no control what happens to us from zero to six, those years when our inner biology is laid down, and should it be surprising that most don't 'rise above'?