In a developed country like the United States, 51 percent of students attending public schools come from low-income families, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — a large number who may be suffering from hindered brain development. For Pollak, the next question his team intends to investigate is what social policies are most beneficial to children living below the poverty line. He’s also not the first person to have seen these unsettling results either.
The journal Nature Neuroscience published a pertinent study this spring, conducted on a larger scale by neuroscientists Kimberly Noble, of New York City’s Columbia University, and, from the opposite coast, Elizabeth Sowell of the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, both of whom looked into the biological underpinnings related to poverty. Their effort spanned several American cities — scanning the brains of 1,099 individuals as their controls — and included children, adolescents, as well as young adults. Genetic ancestry was also factored in, to account for variance in brain structures among ethnic groups.
The lowest income bracket in the study — families earning below $25,000 — showed 6 percent less surface area than the families that earned over $150,000. The research was consistent with other studies, particularly one by Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Her research concerned 44 African-American female infants, roughly a month old, and coming from a mixture of socio-economic backgrounds throughout Philadelphia. Even this early in development, those from low-income milieus evidence having smaller brains than the infants from wealthier contexts.
Farah and her team presented the research in March during a meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Their work, however, is far from over, still planning to follow the infants chosen for the study for an additional two years — as only Pollak’s study has offered some insight into how children with an economic disadvantage develop over time, and not much of the existing literature explicitly isolates the causes.
We do see a correlation in the numbers, but what, if it can be ruled as a single cause, is responsible for this gap in the first place? Among the causes that Farah suspects is the degree of interaction between parents and their children, as this form of socialization increases the likelihood of infants being more regularly exposed to language, allowing their brains to build as they recognize and connect with new sounds. The access to toys can also be a crucial factor — particularly how stimulating the toys that they’re given are for their developing brains. Farah will also factor in regular visits to their home environment.
Jamie Hanson, a psychologist at Duke University, has reckoned many of the researchers’ sentiments as evidence that poverty indeed has an adverse effect, which may make it all the more difficult to eliminate through social policy alone: “These early life circumstances make it tougher for many children and it’s on many of us in society to make sure that children have equal possibilities.”
While the social implications of the work can be significant, and the precise causes remain to be still seen, it would be far from the truth to say that all is lost for those born into a lower-income bracket. While the damage shows signs of persisting, this does not mean that it isn’t reversible. To this end, a study in Mexico revealed that supplements provided to the incomes of poor farmers led to an improvement in the cognitive skills of their children, in just a mere 18 months — all of which suggests that the focus might be better placed on families in general rather than just examining their children.
According to Hanson, we could be seeing another instance of environmental factors impacting DNA — a problem that could arise even before the children are born — and intervention into areas of nutrition and stress management could go a long way in terms of breaking the vicious cycle of poverty.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s Fall 2015 issue.
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