Poor Children May Have Smaller Brains Than Rich Children. Does That Tell Us Anything?

Slate ^ | April 17, 2015 | Jordan Weissmann

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Social scientists have found that by the time children enter kindergarten, there is already a large academic achievement gap between students from wealthy and poor families. We still don't know exactly why that's the case. There's a sense that it at least partly has to do with the fact that affluent mothers and fathers have more intensive parenting sytles—they're more likely to read to their kids, for instance—and have enough money to make sure their toddlers grow up well-nourished, generally cared for, and intellectually stimulated. At the same time, poor children often grow up in chaotic, food-insecure, stressful homes that aren't conducive to a developing mind.

A new study in the journal Nature Neuroscience adds an interesting biological twist to this issue. Using MRI scans of more than 1,000 subjects between the ages of 3 and 20, it finds that children with poor parents tend to have somewhat smaller brains, on some dimensions, than those grow up affluent. Specifically, low-income participants had less surface area on their cerebral cortexes—the gray matter responsible for skills such as language, problem solving, and other higher-order functions we generally just think of as human intelligence. Poorer indviduals in the study also fared worse on a battery of cognitive tests, and a statistical analysis suggested the disparities were related to brain dimensions.

How big a difference are we talking about? According to the researchers, children whose parents earned less than $25,000 per year had 6 percent less surface area on their cortex than those whose parents earned at least $150,000.......

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[PLMerite]

“One has to ask: what is this a formula for?”

A movie titled “Idiocracy.”