Poor Unfortunate Brains

As we know, environmental stress, such as child abuse, changes the genetic makeup of children, raising stress levels and leaving a child wounded for life. A new study demonstrates a strong link in lower and middle-class students between childhood poverty, physiological stress, and adult memory. These findings support neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than middle-class students in school, and eventually life.

Education research documents reveal disproportionately low academic performance of poor children because they tend to go to poorly equipped and ill taught schools, they also have fewer educational resources, consume more low nutrition food, and have less access to health care. Not to mention, the added stress of the parents’ anxiety.

Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement. Scientists found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brain of animals!

Hypothesis: A possible contributor in income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood.

Test of Hypothesis: Analysis of results from previous results of a long term study of stress in 195 poor middle class Caucasian students, half male half female.

The study found a direct link between poverty and stress. Blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested. Given a sequence of items to remember, teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items, those who were well off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items.

“Working memory” is a reliable indicator of reading, language, and problem solving ability, which is critical to succeed not only in school, but also in the work environment. When the birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status, and parenting styles were controlled, the effects remained the same.

Brain structures change with stress and are affected by early-life stress in animal models. The effects of stress produce changes in genes that are then passed from parent to child. Poverty’s effect could be hereditary!


Posted by Sarah Bello (7)

Update

Although the findings were persuasive, they still need to be replicated and developed. Psychobiologist Kim Noble says “They’re not really saying which casual events were stressful. They’re just measuring biological markers of stress.” Other mental consequences of poverty also need to be measured. Different cognitive outcomes have different cause: working memory might be more associated with stress, whereas language might be more associated with hours spent reading to your children. Although some details remain incomplete, evidence of connections between poverty and neurobiology are strong enough to justify real-world testing.