Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

Growing up poor isn't merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory

The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life

Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement

For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty

The findings, though compelling, still need to be replicated and refined. "They're not really saying which causal events were stressful. They're just measuring biological markers of stres