Mike Mariani - The neuroscience of inequality: does poverty show up in children's brains?
There is increasing evidence that growing
up poor diminishes the physical development of a child’s brain.
Dr
Kimberly Noble’s laboratory at Columbia University in New York looks like
your typical day-care centre – save for the team of cognitive neuroscientists
observing kids from behind a large two-way mirror. 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. Noble, a 40-year-old
from outside of Philadelphia who discusses her work with a mix of enthusiasm
and clinical restraint, is among the 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. Now
she’s in the middle of planning a five-year, nationwide study that could
establish a causal link between poverty and brain development – and, in the
process, suggest a path forward for helping our poorest children.
It’s the culmination
of years of work for Noble, who helped jump-start this fledgling field in the
early 2000s when, as a University of Pennsylvania graduate student, she and
renowned cognitive neuroscientist Martha Farah began
exploring the observation that poor kids tended to perform worse academically
than their better-off peers. They wanted to investigate the neurocognitive
underpinnings of this relationship – to trace the long-standing correlation
between socioeconomic status and academic performance back to specific parts of
the brain. “There has been decades
of work from social scientists, looking at socioeconomic disparities in
broad cognitive outcomes – things like IQ or high-school graduation rate,”
Noble says. “But there’s no high-school graduation part of the brain.”
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. So in
2005, Noble and Farah, along with University of Pennsylvania colleague Frank
Norman, recruited
60 children from Philadelphia public-school kindergartens (30
middle-class kids and 30 who were at or just above the poverty line) and gave
them a series of cognitive tests, each of which has been linked to a specific
brain circuit.
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jul/13/neuroscience-inequality-does-poverty-show-up-in-childrens-brains