Posted on 04/18/2015 2:50:13 AM PDT by 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.......
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Yes. That is a factor.
Ignorance is not stupidity, but, on the other hand, stupid people tend to remain ignorant.
When read with an open mind the Bell Curve makes the pieces fall into place. Of course, the book discusses uncomfortable truths which most Americans would prefer to ignore. As we know, ignoring the truth comes with a price.
Leftists definitely tend to be pea-brained. That’s not a theory. That’s a fact.
More like Consumer/Non-Producers pass down, generation after generation, a small relative inactive brain that only requires knowledge to reproduce & a collect welfare check.
Evidently, reliance on welfare makes one stupid.....
This study can be used to make a huge leap in income inequality. So, poor children have smaller brains. What does that tell us? That the war on poverty was ALL wrong. We need to channel a new war and money to support it, to find brain foods to make the poor have bigger brains. Then, we will all be rich!
Maybe you're right, Tuck. Some of us just lucked out all the way.
The Left is still struggling to "discredit" 1984 and Animal Farm.
I think you’re speaking more to “success” than to measurable “IQ.”
A lot of successful people’s children marry other successful people’s children and end up with a mixed bag of smarts and not so smarts.
Its a simple fact. Poor early childhood nutrition will naturally lead to physical underdevelopment. Brains need the right kinds of fat to grow. Its one of the likely reasons Eskimos have the largest brains as a group. They have traditionally had a very high fat diet.
Intelligence is really a very different issue that is only marginally tied to brain size. Ben Carson grew up poor but is far from stupid. He had a mother who cared enough to drive and challenge him.
I grew up poor but have done OK because I had a very different childhood than most kids of today. I was outside all the time absorbing every bit of knowledge and when I was inside, I had a house full of books. I loved TV and still do but I didn’t have cartoons or stupidity TV to watch 24/7. 2 hours of Saturday morning cartoons was pretty much it unless there was a nature show on PBS which you couldn’t tear me away from.
Todays social stratification didn’t exist so much in the past as it does today either. FReeper LS pointed out the “Superzips” to me on twitter the other day where you have whole zip codes where you won’t meet a single “poor” person. Those didn’t really exist 50 years ago. Rich and poor kids played together and learned together. (I’m not suggesting a government solution BTW)
I call BS. I know plenty of poor people who are perceptive, bright, polite, etc.
And plenty of rich people who are purblind, reactionary, rude, etc.
Yes.
The Left is always looking for the next con.
The libs would like grown adults to believe that every minority suffers from a bad environment which inhibits their intellectual growth. That stands reality on its head. Mnay millions of immigrants to these shores have come from horrible environments and immediately contributed. A bad environment was a strong impetus for them to succeed.
And again, if they, libs, don't believe in IQ, why do they support programs intended to increase IQ? Their whole position (like all lib positions) does not address reality.
Quite right.
Lots of people like to believe that IQ doesn’t measure anything important.
But there are many decades of data showing conclusively that whatever IQ tests measure, there is an astonishingly high degree of correlation between whatever it is and life outcomes. Even when you back out race, socio-economic class, family structure and just about any other factor you can come up with.
So whatever IQ is, it’s terribly important. So of course we pretend it doesn’t exist.
Almost everyone is willing to agree that geniuses and retarded people exist, very smart and very stupid. But for some obscure reason they don’t want to take that too its logical conclusion and realize that intelligence, like almost all characteristics, forms a bell curve. That is, of course, why it’s called the “normal distribution.”
Where you are on the “average” section of the bell curve is critical in life prospects. That’s 90 to 110, and it’s 52% of the population. But we pretend that 90 IQ has the same abilities as 110 IQ, and it just isn’t true.
This sounds like a good reason to discourage poor people from having children. Instead, our worthless government pays them to do just that.
Cloward-Piven anybody?
The problem is that increasing parental involvement will simply not help a low-potential child exceed his potential. It will help him reach it, but nothing the parents can do will help him exceed his inborn potential.
Obviously there are genetic factors but I agree that one factor is those who have no interest in what is over the horizon. They live and interbreed with like minded people which leads to a steadily declining brain/intelligence.
My little town has one black family. They aren’t wealthy or anything but those are some of the brightest black kids I have ever seen. The oldest is in college studying agricultural technologies because he wants to be a farmer.
Yes, it tells you the poor kids parents also had smaller brains.
Do these idiots actually get paid for these studies?
Yes. They apply for grants and they KNOW what the grant giver needs from them.
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