Effects of poverty on the brain

Immordino-Yang study

• 73 low-income teens
• five-year study
• culture, family relationships, exposure to violence and other factors
• 40 “heart-tugging and inspirational” video clips
• MRI machine
• two year interval

Immordino-Yang study

Early results show a troubling trend: Kids who grow up with higher levels of violence as a backdrop in their lives, based on MRI scans, have weaker real-time neural connections and interaction in parts of the brain involved in awareness, judgment, and ethical and emotional processing.

Tries to coin term neuroscience of poverty.

Still largely based on correlations between brain patterns and particular environments: violence, excessive noise, chaos at home, pollution, malnutrition, abuse and parents without jobs

Hanson study

Introduction

• 20% of children (15 million) in the US below federal poverty line
• parents speaks less often, less sophisticated, less likely to join literary activities, smaller designated spaces, fewer home learning resources, less likely to have access to the Internet
•  $1,000 increase in family income, increase cognitive outcomes 6% of a standard deviation
• animal studies
• frontal lobe - planning, impulse control, and control of attention, vulnerable to early stress

Hanson study

Methodology

• 77 subjects
• SES (socioeconomic status)
• MRI scans
• first scan at age 13 months and subsequent scans approximately every half-year until children were four years old.

Hanson study

Results

• poor and near poor households were found to have significantly lower average total gray matter volumes
• did not detect statistically significant differences in total cerebral volume

Hanson study

Hanson study

Hanson study

References

• Hayasaki E. How Poverty Affects the Brain. Newsweek, 25. Aug 2016.
• Hanson JL, Hair N, Shen DG, Shi F, Gilmore JH, Wolfe BL, et al. (2013) Family Poverty Affects the Rate of Human Infant Brain Growth. PLoS ONE 8(12): e80954. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080954