WaPo: New brain science shows poor kids have smaller brains than affluent kids
Neuroscientists who studied the brain scans of nearly 1,100 children and young adults nationwide from ages 3 to 20 found that the surface area of the cerebral cortex was linked to family income. They discovered that the brains of children in families that earned less than $25,000 a year had surface areas 6 percent smaller than those whose families earned $150,000 or more. The poor children also scored lower on average on a battery of cognitive tests.
So, a 6% larger brain is accounts for that 600% income? Sort of like the tiny appendage that once conferred higher brain power and income on men.
But of course:
The region of the brain in question handles language, memory, spatial skills and reasoning, all important to success in school and beyond.
It’s larger in the areas of the brain that are most critical to what standardized tests measures.
This latest scientific study wouldn’t be complete without letting Charles Murray weigh in:
“It is confidently known that brain size is correlated with IQ, IQ measured in childhood is correlated with income as an adult, and parental IQ is correlated with children’s IQ,” Murray wrote in an e-mail. “I would be astonished if children’s brain size were NOT correlated with parental income. How could it be otherwise?”
No, Mr. Murray it’s not known that brain size is correlated with IQ. Adequately debunked decades ago by the brilliant, evolutionary biologist, paleontologist, and historian of science, Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man But nothing to stop you and your racist/classist colleagues from squandering another hundred years to prove your hypothesis. [If cosmological science moved at the glacial pace of “conservative” social scientists, earth would still be the center of the universe.]
We know at least 80% of the reasons why poor kids don’t thrive as well in academic settings as their more economically advantaged peers. Basically, it’s because their poor. Conceived, born, and reared disadvantaged. Inadequate maternal, infant, and child nutrition. An environment short on stimulation, both physical and cognitive for urban kids. Parents that don’t read books themselves or to their children. (Poor and rich alike are welcome at libraries.) Higher economic and social stresses on the family.
But we’ll continue not to do anything truly effective about any of that in favor of studies to rationalize why wealthy people spawn superior children. Even when their children are obviously, cognitively nothing but average. We even elect those average folks from wealthy families POTUS.
There are plenty of explanations for this. Start with nutrition. Poor kids have less quality nutrition, and nutrition affects brain development.
Thought I included that. May not be as much of a factor for brain development today in the US as it was in the past when the poor didn’t get enough calories. Today most consume too many calories which isn’t good for their physical health but does assure that their brains get all or most of what they need.
Calories from junk food are not the same as calories from quality food sources. Certain kinds of fat are good for nerve development (and nerve development requires fat, animal fat). Other kinds are not.
Not disputing that but the primary cause of stunted brain development is insufficient calories. The brain is a calorie hog.
Murray’s deceptive “scientific” representations are bad. They represent the same racist attitudes prevalent in his response to this story. Charles wants social policy in the U.S. to be controlled by something he imparts as fact: it is not only useless to try to create class mobility, it is actually destructive to try to do so. That’s why he responds to this report not as a problem to be solved, but a fate to be accepted.
The lower classes are inferior and always will be. The New Deal and Great Society must be destroyed, as they are taking money away from the rich, who are intellectually and morally superior.
The question is, with premises like these, why let these inferior people vote, or participate in the commons at all?
If you believe as Murray wants you to, why wouldn’t you want to dispatch the lower classes entirely?
Murray’s purpose is to put an imprimatur on the belief that white people and those of wealth/income privilege are cognitively more advanced/developed than others. Therefore, it’s “natural” that they should predominate in government, academia, and higher paying professions. The scientific basis of his “proof” is no better than those in the 19th century that measured brain size and concluded that white men had larger brains and therefore, were smarter than women and minority men.