At the 2010 Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, a group of scientists held a session on how poverty changes the brain. Neuroscientist Helen Neville of the University of Oregon in Eugene joined the discussion and described some of her group’s studies on the brains of 3- to 5-year-old children who grow up poor. She met with Science News neuroscience writer Laura Sanders after the November 14 session to discuss some of the Oregon group’s findings about what a low socioeconomic status does to the brain, and how intervention can help counter those effects.
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How does poverty affect the brain?
Children growing up in poverty, for various reasons, have much poorer brain development and cognitive development than children growing up in not-poor environments. This has been shown by many people around the world for many decades. We now have animal models showing some key characteristics of an impoverished environment, for example, parental neglect. Rats that neglect their offspring create differences in brains and learning that are very parallel to those in humans.
What is different in the brains of kids brought up in lower socioeconomic environments?
Executive function and self-control is lower, language skills are lower, IQ is lower, attention — the ability to focus on one thing and ignore distracting information — is poorer and working memory is poorer. Those cognitive skills are different.