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.
