Posted on 02/19/2008 10:09:42 PM PST by Xenophon450
As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development. The effect is to impair language development and memory and hence the ability to escape poverty for the rest of the childs life.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Having bad character is a detriment to a person’s life, too.
Let’s ban people thinking others have bad character.
In my honest opinion, and please, one who is more versed in neurology correct me if I am wrong. This just sounds like bunk science contrived to make the poor into hapless victims...is that correct?
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So is laziness.
So now we have perpetual “victims”? A socialist Democrats dream come true! This is nothing more than a call for a permanent nanny-state.
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“Poverty poisons people...women and minorities hardest hit...”
Since the article didn’t state the researcher’s criteria of poverty, social status, or give any demographics, or number of people in the study, I tend to think Krugman’s opinion piece is just that.
Krugman. As far as this junk is worth reading.
reading the NY Slimes will make anyone less intelligent — the stress hormones are elevated by so many stupid statements and ignorant rants.......
The question is: Can environment impact brain function? I’d say, yeah, sure.
The thrust of the NYT piece is that this is the state of affairs in the universe. Not so.
One study means next to nothing of the sort and should not be taken as fact, but merely as one study's findings. As a retired neuroscientist, I can tell you that experience (stress) influences adrenocorticoid levels, and that was established a long time ago (see Hans Selye's work.) Whether poverty and social class status constitute stressors sufficient to also do this will require many, many more replications of this research by other researchers.
I never quite understood the fetish for poverty than many Christian groups seem to have.
I have to think the poverty rate in the good ole USA would be lower if we quit importing a million poor people a year...
I thought I saw the last of that poster in 1988.
“If you want to know what god think about money, just look at the people he gave it to.” — Dorothy Parker.
The stress hormone they're referring to specifically, I imagine, is cortisol. A high level of cortisol has all sorts of unpleasant effects, such as obesity and heart problems.
Cortisol has effects on neural processing, definitely. There's several famous studies on the subject that demonstrate an "inverted U" correlation between cortisol levels and learning capabilities.
That is, let's say you're trying to teach a rat to run a maze. A very, very stressed-out rat will be unable to learn the maze; it's too busy fretting over every little decision and fearing the consequences of wrong turns, so it simply can't concentrate enough to remember anything about the maze. A very, very mellow rat also will fail to learn anything about the maze; after all, why bother running this silly maze when life is groovy? In order to learn the maze, a rat has to be somewhere in between - life has to be good enough to be worth living, but still hard enough to be worth engaging one's curiosity to explore the possibility of making it better.
The optimal levels of cortisol are different for every individual rat. Just like humans, some rats are very mellow (perform best with low levels of cortisol) while others are very high-strung (perform best with high levels). Both genetics and upbringing are driving factors; if a rat has a stressful childhood and grows up aggressive and high-strung, it will normally have high levels of cortisol, and therefore its inverted U would be shifted to the right of a rat who's had it easier.
That doesn't mean the rat is dumber; it means the rat needs to be pushed more towards negative consequences in order to be convinced that something is worth learning. A mellow rat you can train by giving it little sugar cubes whenever it makes a correct turn through a maze; you can't do that with a high-strung rat because it doesn't believe that there's actually any pattern to the location of the cubes - the world just wouldn't be that kind. You can train the high-strung rat, though, by giving it electric shocks every time it makes a wrong turn; this makes it come alert and pay attention to the shock pattern, whereas it just makes the mellow rat confused and depressed.
None of this necessarily addresses stress levels during childhood development per se. There could theoretically be some kind of new, unfamiliar effect of cortisol that causes it to stunt the growth of neural connections in early childhood. But I'd be hard-pressed to know what evolutionary function such a stunting effect would serve.
Plenty of human beings have had extremely rough childhoods, and have persevered through them. Plenty more (at least in this country) have had gentle, coddled, overprotected childhoods, and they're a wreck.
Perhaps this author is claiming that there's a nonzero correlation between poverty, stress, and stupidity, even if it's not an absolute predictor. But, naturally, correlation is not causation. Let's put this bluntly. Stupid people are likely to live in poverty. Stupid people are likely to have stupid children. Children raised in poverty, especially if they lack the cognitive capabilities to make do with limited resources, are likely to feel lots of stress. This does not mean that the stress itself is what makes them stupid; they already lost the genetic lotto to begin with.
We should talk shop sometime. :)
What crap. Poverty made me work my butt off not to be poor because I hated it. As they say...
I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and believe me, rich is better.
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