Linking Thinking

EEGs Show Brain Differences Between Poor and Rich Kids

Kids from lower socioe­co­nomic lev­els show brain phys­i­ol­ogy pat­terns sim­i­lar to some­one who actu­ally had dam­age in the frontal lobe as an adult, said Robert Knight, a UC Berke­ley pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy and direc­tor of their Neu­ro­science Insti­tute. This is a wake-up call. It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health prob­lems, but they might actu­ally not be get­ting full brain devel­op­ment from the stress­ful and rel­a­tively impov­er­ished envi­ron­ment asso­ci­ated with low socioe­co­nomic sta­tus: fewer books, less read­ing, fewer games, fewer vis­its to muse­ums. This study has been repeated many times in the last thirty years, with anal­o­gous results; this one is unique in that is sorts out the vari­ables that peo­ple have used to dis­count pre­vi­ous stud­ies and yet ends by ask­ing “Can this be repli­cated?” For heaven’s sake. What more proof do we need?

♦ ♦ ♦

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Subscribe without commenting