EEGs show brain differences between poor and rich kids

[Ohio Joe]

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/12/02_cortex.shtml

Interesting article. Like a lot of studies, it almost seems a no-brainer but to me it shows that the ever widening gap between rich and poor, as well as the elimination of the middle class is truly dumbing down America.

[ecstatic]

1. very disturbing news! nt

[Ezlivin]

2. Nutrition has a lot to do with it.

Insufficient food or food of poor quality simply doesn't provide enough nutrition to form the necessary underpinnings for healthy development.

It's time to redistribute the wealth.

[Lisa0825]

8. Including prenatal nutrition and other care.

Poor kids start life at a major disadvantage. Sure, some poor kids go on to break the cycle, but for many others, there are problems with them that are every bit as real as a genetic disorder. It's the whole nature/nurture discussion.

[NashVegas]

13. Last Year There Was a Story About Thorobred Racehorses

That showed the environment a horse is raised in is measurably responsible for their winning records than genetics.

The offspring of expensive stallions owe their success more to how they are reared, trained and ridden than good genes, a study has found.

Only 10% of a horse's lifetime winnings can be attributed to their bloodline, research in Biology Letters shows.

Edinburgh scientists compared the stud fees, winnings and earnings of more than 4,000 racehorses since 1922.

...

There are good genes out there to be bought but they don't necessarily come with the highest price tag," Dr Alastair Wilson told the BBC News website.

"It seems much more likely that people who can afford to pay high stud fees can also afford to manage and train their horses well."

The offspring of expensive stallions did tend to win more over their lifetime, he said, but genes played only a small role.

By far the biggest factor was the horse's environment - the way they were trained, the choice of races entered and which jockeys were employed, Dr Wilson added.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7150251.stm

[FarCenter]

22. But compare quarter horses and thorobreds

Thorobreds are unlikely to outrun quarterhorses at short distances, and vice versa for long distances.

[melm00se]

3. the article

doesn't define what they mean by "high" and "low" income. does anyone know how the study defined these variables?

[FarCenter]

4. Actually, these are kids with rich or poor parents

It would be interesting to see whether the parents' brain function shows the same differences.

[Quantess]

11. Did you read the article?

The researchers found a definitive difference between kids with low socioeconomic status (low SES) and kids from high SES bakgrounds.

Although, you raise a good point. If the parents' brain function is similar, then that may result in different parenting styles. If the parents grew up in an impoverished, unstimulating environment, then they wouldn't naturally provide a stimulating, intellectually enriched environment for their own kids.

[FarCenter]

21. Only the press release appears to be published, couldn't find the paper online

The sample is pretty small, only 26, "selected" from a larger set of kids in the "Wellness In Kids" program.

From the press release it is impossible to say anything other than that for this small sample prefrontal brain function of the kids was correlated with parents incomes. There is no evidence for a causal relationship.

It could be explained by

- chance,

- parental behavior and/or child environment driven by economic factors,

- parental behavior and/or child environment driven by other factors, e.g. cultural, deficits in parental intelligence, drugs or alchohol, etc.

- neighborhood and community factors, e.g. early schooling experiences, since these kids were about 9-10 years old.

Need more data.

That said, it is true that a deprived environment can affect childhood development. An acquaintance of my mother had twins after a few other children. She was in poor health and not able to cope very well, so the twins were kept in a cardboard box behind the stove for a couple of years. As young adults, they were not quite right.

However, that was a pretty extreme case, and I think that children are both more resiliant to their environment and more a slave to their genes than is generally admitted.

[kath]

23. The article refered to the research as "a study recently accepted for publication by the Journal of

Cognitive Neuroscience", which means that it probably hasn't been published yet.

looks like they corrected for the drug/alcohol issue:
The article says the children were "normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status" and "'These kids have no neural damage, no prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, no neurological damage,' Kishiyama said"

Although the sample size is small, the differences seen in the study were not likely due to chance - these Berkeley researchers are presumably knowledgeable enough of statistics to be capable of determining whether the variation is statistically significant before submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal.

Granted, the researchers don't know exactly *which* factors in the environment of the low SES kids are are most involved in affecting prefrontal brain function, but there do seem to be some clues from earlier studies. It's good to note though, that there are some interventional studies going on to help determine how these deficits can be remedied.

[glowing]

5. Hmm.

One child is in flight/ fight mode. The other in a safer less hectic environment. Its disgusting so many innocent are lost in the idiocy. A license for everything, but to parent.

[eilen]

6. I used to see it when I saw my

sister-in-law's nephews (her sister's kids). They might as well have been wearing "future county jail resident" on their t-shirts. Her sister has about 6 kids of various paternity, living off whichever boyfriend with some social services help when she can bother to show up at appointments. They move frequently and at any given month the electric bill is under a different child's SSN. To say that the kids are not a focus of their parents, or at least their mother, is an understatement. I think she is happy about her decision to get pregnant at a young age so to provide for a babysitter now so she can go out and "party". Last I heard the oldest has already been arrested for robbing someone's house--I wouldn't be surprised if his mother gave him the idea. PWT.

My opinion is that much is determined (within ranges for genetics) by the parents and how they parent their children during the formative years-- probably during the first 10 although the first 4 are most critical.

[surrealAmerican]

7. This is so sad.

Disadvantaged ten-year-olds have the equivalent brain function of stroke victims. I wonder if they could figure out just what specific factors (for example: diet, stress, parental attention, school quality) are the cause, or if it is a combination of factors.

[Quantess]

17. It's already well known that all of the above are factors.

However, school quality is an afterthought, because birth to three is the most critical developmental period for children. By the time they get to school, crucial cognitive development should have already taken place. That's why programs such as Head Start and other early intervention programs are so essential.

[supernova]

9. They don't get the nutrition nor the intellectual stimulation

that better off parents can provide.

Every human baby starts out with equal intellectual capacity (unless they have a brain injury somehow), but it's the enviornment as to whether they get to use it and develop it or not.

We've known this for decades, but it's nice that science can now show physical evidence in the workings of the brain.

I really feel sorry for children who have parents who can't afford to stimulate them at higher levels. And I don't mean stuff or lots of toys, I mean just talking to them, getting them to look at things in their environment, study it, cuddling them, interacting with them. That's what makes their brains grow.

[MedleyMisty]

10. Really?

My brother and I do have different fathers, but we grew up with the same mother.

He once said to me, in his thirties - "Fiction means it ain't true, right?". I was doing his senior English homework for him when I was in second grade.

So if we started out exactly the same genetically and grew up with the same mother who treated us the same way (and I assure you that she did and that she did not put me on a pedestal because I was the smart one - she never advocated for me at school, I never got to skip a grade and we certainly didn't have the money for private school, and she never even exposed me to any educational material that I did not ask her to - she was the exact opposite of a "helicopter parent"), how is that possible?

God, I'm trying to find a source but you have to pay or belong to an organization to read the full articles.

Hmm, apparently the information about mental disabilities and genetics is not as closely guarded by gatekeepers, so we'll go with that.

This link discusses the genetics of autism.

http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=115&a=3578

A fascinating blog about genetics and mental illness.

http://www.genetics.med.ed.ac.uk/blog/

It seems that humans do not all come with the same exact genes.

Again, you have to pay or belong to organizations for the most part, but do a search for neurogenetics. If humans all had the exact same genes, why would there be an entire field devoted to neurogenetics? Or are they all using the same baby's genes for the research, perhaps?

I'm not at all denying that nurture has a lot to do with it. It's just that you can't completely discount nature. Unless you have a link to a study showing that 100% of humans are all genetically the same?

Here's some more sites.

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/disorders/whataregd/

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/geneticdisorders.html

http://www.fragilex.org/html/summary.htm

In summary - because of the gatekeeping I can't know enough to be sure or to really have much of an educated opinion, but it really seems to me that you can't say that intelligence is 100% nurture. We come with different genetic potentials, and then our environment affects the expression of those genes.

https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/6cfebd6304576bf085256c7900642f84?OpenDocument

[Quantess]

12. The natural conclusion to your viewpoint would be

that the results of the brain differences in the study show that innate brain capacities dictate our socioecnomic status. The poor families are poor because their brains are innately less than optimal, and the high SES families are where they are economically, because of their genetic brain capacity.

[SoCalDem]

16. It's probably closer to the "chicken v egg" question..

Since poor people tend to cluster, they also marry each other/ cohabit & rear families together.

People who are not as intellectually stimulated as the "smarter" people of the community, will probably give birth to and raise children similar to themselves..rinse & repeat..

Given an opportunity, many poor kids can and DO surpass the expectations many have of them, but only in the movies, does the poor kid from the "wrong side of the tracks", hook up with the dashing young millionaire and then go on to lead a life of luxury & stimulating conversation..

There's a reason why Pygmalion is such a good story.. It's a story..possible, but unlikely.

Desperately poor kids grow up stressed, scared and undernourished, so it's not surprising to me that they may "score" lower...but they have street smarts that many "upper-crusties" will never have.. Survival instinct is also "intelligence"...

[bobbolink]

19. Are you suggesting Survival of the Fittest?

[Quantess]

25. I'm not suggesting anything.

My response to post #10 was to point out, if you really believe that brain capacities, intelligence, etc are solely genetically determined, then you would have to conclude that the children in this study have their lot in life because of their genes.

To me, this study clearly demonstrates the effect of environment.

[Jackpine Radical]

15. The heritability coefficient for IQ is usually estimated to be about 0.5.

Back in the 50's and 60's a British psychologist named Cyril Burt was claiming that his twin studies produced a heritability coefficient of about 0.8, but his work contained fraudulent data.

Anyway, the whole question of heritability is complicated. If a group of pairs of twins, even though they are separated early, are raised in different middle-class families in the same culture, then their environments are relatively similar, and environmental variation will form a relatively small component of the total variance in IQ, while if they were raised in wildly different circumstances (one in middle-class London and the other in an Amazon tribal society, say), then the differences in environment would contribute a much larger component to the verall IQ variance, and the heritability coefficient obtained in that study would be much smaller. So in fact, the estimate of the size of the genetic contribution to IQ is directly dependent of the circumstances of the study.

[Gregorian]

14. No shit! One's worried, and the other isn't.

This stuff takes studies? Good lord. Someone give me the cash. I'll tell you what's going on.

My own experience tells me my brain is different when I'm worried about survival or not. Sheesh.

[kath]

18. There is also a thread about this in the Science forum:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x47156

[leftstreet]

20. Then why is GWB such a fucktard?

[bean fidhleir]

24. The psychiatrist Robert Coles did a study with kids in which

he used the Draw-a-Person test to estimate a number of factors. The heartbreaking results showed the effects of poverty and racism. The Black "person" drawn by Black kids was almost uniformly smaller, more fragmented, and "uglier" than the White "person" drawn by the same child. White kids didn't show that effect. Their drawings were more richer and more detailed, and usually showed little difference between the White and Black "persons".