- Children who grow up poor shown to have smaller brain volume, By Michelle Castillo, October 28, 2013, CBS News: “Growing up poor may have an effect on brain size, a new study suggests. Researchers wrote in a study published in JAMA Pediatrics on Oct. 28 that children who grew up in impoverished environments had smaller white and cortical gray matter volumes in the brain, in addition to a smaller hippocampal and amygdala volume…”
- The Lasting Impacts of Poverty on the Brain, By Emily Badger, October 28, 2013, Atlantic Cities: “Poverty shapes people in some hard-wired ways that we’re only now beginning to understand. Back in August, we wrote about some provocative new research that found that poverty imposes a kind of tax on the brain. It sucks up so much mental bandwidth – capacity spent wrestling with financial trade-offs, scarce resources, the gap between bills and income – that the poor have fewer cognitive resources left over to succeed at parenting, education, or work. Experiencing poverty is like knocking 13 points off your IQ as you try to navigate everything else. That’s like living, perpetually, on a missed night of sleep. That finding offered a glimpse of what poverty does to a person during a moment in time. Picture a mother trying to accomplish a single task (making dinner) while preoccupied with another (paying the rent on time). But scientists also suspect that poverty’s disadvantages – and these moments – accumulate across time. Live in poverty for years, or even generations, and its effects grow more insidious. Live in poverty as a child, and it affects you as an adult, too…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty