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ScienceDaily (Dec. 6, 2008) — University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.
In a study recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.
Brain function was measured by means of an electroencephalograph (EEG) – basically, a cap fitted with electrodes to measure electrical activity in the brain – like that used to assess epilepsy, sleep disorders and brain tumors.
"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, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. "We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response."
Previous studies have shown a possible link between frontal lobe function and behavioral differences in children from low and high socioeconomic levels, but according to cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, first author of the new paper, "those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity."
Co-author W. Thomas Boyce, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of public health who currently is the British Columbia Leadership Chair of Child Development at the University of British Columbia (UBC), is not surprised by the results. "We know kids growing up in resource-poor environments have more trouble with the kinds of behavioral control that the prefrontal cortex is involved in regulating. But the fact that we see functional differences in prefrontal cortex response in lower socioeconomic status kids is definitive."
Boyce, a pediatrician and developmental psychobiologist, heads a joint UC Berkeley/UBC research program called WINKS – Wellness in Kids – that looks at how the disadvantages of growing up in low socioeconomic circumstances change children's basic neural development over the first several years of life.
"This is a wake-up call," Knight said. "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."
Kishiyama, Knight and Boyce suspect that the brain differences can be eliminated by proper training. They are collaborating with UC Berkeley neuroscientists who use games to improve the prefrontal cortex function, and thus the reasoning ability, of school-age children.
"It's not a life sentence," Knight emphasized. "We think that with proper intervention and training, you could get improvement in both behavioral and physiological indices."
Kishiyama, Knight, Boyce and their colleagues selected 26 children ages 9 and 10 from a group of children in the WINKS study. Half were from families with low incomes and half from families with high incomes. For each child, the researchers measured brain activity while he or she was engaged in a simple task: watching a sequence of triangles projected on a screen. The subjects were instructed to click a button when a slightly skewed triangle flashed on the screen.
The researchers were interested in the brain's very early response – within as little as 200 milliseconds, or a fifth of a second – after a novel picture was flashed on the screen, such as a photo of a puppy or of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
"An EEG allows us to measure very fast brain responses with millisecond accuracy," Kishiyama said.
The researchers discovered a dramatic difference in the response of the prefrontal cortex not only when an unexpected image flashed on the screen, but also when children were merely watching the upright triangles waiting for a skewed triangle to appear. Those from low socioeconomic environments showed a lower response to the unexpected novel stimuli in the prefrontal cortex that was similar, Kishiyama said, to the response of people who have had a portion of their frontal lobe destroyed by a stroke.
"When paying attention to the triangles, the prefrontal cortex helps you process the visual stimuli better. And the prefrontal cortex is even more involved in detecting novelty, like the unexpected photographs," he said. But in both cases, "the low socioeconomic kids were not detecting or processing the visual stimuli as well. They were not getting that extra boost from the prefrontal cortex."
"These kids have no neural damage, no prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, no neurological damage," Kishiyama said. "Yet, the prefrontal cortex is not functioning as efficiently as it should be. This difference may manifest itself in problem solving and school performance."
The researchers suspect that stressful environments and cognitive impoverishment are to blame, since in animals, stress and environmental deprivation have been shown to affect the prefrontal cortex. UC Berkeley's Marian Diamond, professor emeritus of integrative biology, showed nearly 20 years ago in rats that enrichment thickens the cerebral cortex as it improves test performance. And as Boyce noted, previous studies have shown that children from poor families hear 30 million fewer words by the time they are four than do kids from middle-class families.
"In work that we and others have done, it really looks like something as simple and easily done as talking to your kids" can boost prefrontal cortex performance, Boyce said.
"We are certainly not blaming lower socioeconomic families for not talking to their kids – there are probably a zillion reasons why that happens," he said. "But changing developmental outcomes might involve something as accessible as helping parents to understand that it is important that kids sit down to dinner with their parents, and that over the course of that dinner it would be good for there to be a conversation and people saying things to each other."
"The study is suggestive and a little bit frightening that environmental conditions have such a strong impact on brain development," said Silvia Bunge, UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology who is leading the intervention studies on prefrontal cortex development in teenagers by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Boyce's UBC colleague, Adele Diamond, showed last year that 5- and 6-year-olds with impaired executive functioning, that is, poor problem solving and reasoning abilities, can improve their academic performance with the help of special activities, including dramatic play.
Bunge hopes that, with fMRI, she can show improvements in academic performance as a result of these games, actually boosting the activity of the prefrontal cortex.
"People have tried for a long time to train reasoning, largely unsuccessfully," Bunge said. "Our question is, 'Can we replicate these initial findings and at the same time give kids the tools to succeed?'"
This research is supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health.
By the way... IQ is NOT a function of genetics!
Brain tests show child wealth gap
The brains of children from low-income families process information differently to those of their wealthier counterparts, US research suggests.
Normal nine and 10-year-olds from rich and poor backgrounds had differing electrical activity in a part of the brain linked to problem solving.
The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience study was described as a "wake-up call" about the impact of deprivation.
A UK researcher said it could shed light on early brain development.
The 26 children in the study, conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, were measured using an electroencephalograph (EEG), which measured activity in the "prefrontal cortex" of the brain.
Half were from low income homes, and half from high income families.
During the test, an image the children had not been briefed to expect was flashed onto a screen, and their brain responses were measured.
Those from lower income families showed a lower prefrontal cortex response to it than those from wealthier households.
Dr Mark Kishiyama, one of the researchers, said: "The low socioeconomic kids were not detecting or processing the visual stimuli as well - they were not getting that extra boost from the prefrontal cortex."
Since the children were, in health terms, normal in every way, the researchers suspected that "stressful environments" created by low socioeconomic status might be to blame.
Previous studies have suggested that children in low-income families are spoken to far less - on average hearing 30 million fewer words by the age of four.
Talking boost
Professor Thomas Boyce, another of the researchers, said that talking more to children could boost prefrontal cortex development.
"We are certainly not blaming lower socioeconomic families for not talking to their kids - there are probably a zillion reasons why that happens."
His colleague, Professor Robert Knight, added: "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."
He said that with "proper intervention and training", improvements could be made, even in older children.
Dr Emese Nagy, from the University of Dundee, said that it was a "pioneering" study which could aid understanding of how environment could affect brain development.
She said: "Children who grow up in a different environment may have very different early experiences, and may process information differently than children from a different environment.
"The study showed that low socioeconomic status children behaved exactly the same way as high socioeconomic status children, but their brain processed the information differently."
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Great videos. I just finished reading a book not to long ago by Dr. Wayne Dyer. "Change your thoughts - Change your life".
81 Essays on the 81 verses of the Tao Te Ching written 500 years before the birth of Christ, by Lao-tzu
Regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of our existance.
BTW, I am buying one of the scrolls mentioned in the video.
Thanks
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Dear Buffalo Friends,
We have entered the largest scale wild buffalo slaughter since the 19th century. Now is the time to contact Congress and urge them to take proactive measures to stop the slaughter and protect America's last wild bison population and its habitat.
CONTACT CONGRESS NOW!
Write your Senators: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Write your House Rep: https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has completed its report on the Interagency Bison Management Plan and an associated $13,000,000 land deal near Yellowstone National Park requested by Rep. Nick J. Rahall II and Rep. Maurice Hinchey in response to public outcry over the ongoing slaughter of Yellowstone's wild bison, and the failure of the land deal to provide habitat for wild migrating bison. We encourage you to contact their offices directly on the report's availability and what Congress intends to do next.
Since its inception, this multimillion dollar taxpayer funded plan has eliminated 3,079 wild buffalo from the Yellowstone ecosystem, mainly on public lands in America's flagship Yellowstone National Park and the Gallatin National Forest.
This season's death toll, which so far numbers 1,160 wild bison, surpasses that of 1996-1997 when 1,084 bison were killed and constitutes the largest wild bison slaughter since the 19th century.
Read BFC's press release from March 17, 2008: http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/media/press0708/pressreleases0708/031708.....
As of March 18, 2008, Al Nash from Public Affairs Yellowstone National Park reports another approximately 45 wild bison trapped at Stephens Creek inside the Park awaiting shipment to slaughterhouses.
In the face of this wanton slaughter of America's natural heritage of wild bison in their native habitat local Montanans are taking action to give bison more room to roam.
Recently, 69 residents of Horse Butte, Hebgen Lake, and West Yellowstone, Montana sent a letter to the people in charge of bison management requesting that wild bison be allowed to range on Horse Butte without being harassed, trapped, and slaughtered by government agents. This letter is available online: http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/legal/horsebutte.html
Local Montanans support having wild bison in their neighborhood on Horse Butte, a wildlife-rich peninsula extending over 24,000 acres from the border of Yellowstone National Park to Hebgen Lake, just north of West Yellowstone, Montana.
Montanans have been joined by over 20,000 people who have contacted Montana's State Veterinarian Marty Zaluski, Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Suzanne Lewis, Gallatin National Forest Supervisor Mary Erickson, and Montana Fish Wildlife & Parks Director Jeff Hagener, requesting that they adapt to changed circumstances and allow wild bison some room to roam on their native range in Montana.
The Galanis family recently purchased the lone cattle operation on Horse Butte and has ceased grazing cattle and declared their land a Yellowstone Ranch Preserve, a sanctuary for wild bison migrating from Yellowstone National Park. The lone public grazing allotment on Horse Butte was vacated by court order in 2002.
There is no longer even a hint of justification for persisting with invasive government actions to harass, trap, and kill wild bison where cattle do not graze, and no more justification for spending taxpayer funds to haze, trap and slaughter bison on Horse Butte.
Local, neighborhood support for letting bison roam in the Gardiner Basin and upper Madison Valley is strong, and Americans are looking to our representatives and supporters in Congress to find ways to secure a future for wild bison in Yellowstone.
PLEASE TAKE ACTION TO STOP THE WILD BUFFALO SLAUGHTER NOW!
Write your Senators: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Write your House Rep: https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
Sign on to the Horse Butte letter: http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/legal/horsebutte.html
Thank you for taking action to protect America's last wild bison population.
For more information please contact Darrell Geist, BFC's Habitat Coordinator at z@wildrockies.org.
ROAM FREE!
~ Buffalo Field Campaign
--
Media & Outreach
Buffalo Field Campaign
P.O. Box 957
West Yellowstone, MT 59758
406-646-0070
bfc-media@wildrockies.org
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