Replies

Also from the article (which I was just about to post, Pharmboy!):

The pattern of development may also be affected by factors like diet, hours spent in school or the number of siblings, and these may come to light by asking parents how they raised their children.

Now, I notice they did not mention "teachers" as part of the potential influence on the brain -- yet, teachers have been deemed by other research to be the #1 most influential part of a child's life. (I have mixed feelings about that.)

I also found the mention of wealth interesting in the research. What I would like to see is a study done on intelligent children in poor neighborhoods, to find out why it is that some students will grow and develop quite a bit, and others, in the same negative circumstances, do not.

I guess the researchers did not think to study the kids of crack addicts and prisoners in this study, but, they should, since these are the kinds of kids many teachers are dealing with today.

Interestingly "wealth" seems relevant to this study. That is why I would like to know the rest of the story.

This is just probably a confound in the experimental design. Much biomedical research goes on in Bethesda, Maryland, just because of the proximity of the National Institutes of Health and several large and internationally prominent research hospitals. Unfortunately if you're a scientist you have to draw your study subjects from the local area--you are not going to be able to get many kids from the ghettos of Southeast DC to get on a bus for a couple of hours to come up to Bethesda to have brain scans. So you get local kids. And the local kids tend to come from a good background because Bethesda is one of the most expensive places in America to live. That also implies that their parents are smart, or they wouldn't be able to have the money to buy a house in Bethesda.