RICH PARENTS= BRAINY KIDS
MONEY MATTERS The wealthier your parents are, the larger the surface area of your brain is likely to be — making you more intelligent. This is according to the world’s largest study of child brain structure and socio- economic status, reports newscien ti
BENEFITS OF INCOME
“Children from lower income families have shown on average more difficulties with language functioning, school performance and other metrics of cognitive development,” says Elizabeth Sowell at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in California. “This is not to say that all economically disadvantaged children perform worse than all children with greater financial resources, but it is likely that resources afforded to the more affluent impact the way the brain develops.”
INSULATION BOOST
To better understand this relationship, Sowell and her colleagues used MRI scans to examine the brain structure of more than 1000 children between the ages of three and 20 living in the US.
Both parental education and income predicted the size of a child’s brain surface area, and the effect was most noticeable in regions related to language, reading and spatial skills. Sowell says this may reflect greater insulation of the connections between different brain areas.
Nerves transmit electrical impulses between brain cells and are insulated with a fatty layer called myelin — the better insulated a nerve, the faster it is able to transmit these impulses.
STRESS OR STIMULATION
Although the findings provide the strongest evidence yet of a relationship between brain surface area, cognitive ability and socioeconomic status, the mechanism that links them is unknown.
“Experimental evidence in humans is lacking,” says Franck Ramus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, adding that this would require randomly allocating young children to strictly controlled environments. “That’s not possible for obvious reasons,” he says. However, animal experiments have shown that stressful or stimulating early environments can affect brain growth and development. “There are good reasons to believe that at least some of the correlations reported in this study reflect a genuine causal relationship.”
Source: www. newscientist. com