In a study published this year in Nature Neuroscience, several co-authors and I found that family income is significantly correlated with children’s brain size — specifically, the surface area of the cerebral cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain that does most of the cognitive heavy lifting. Further, we found that increases in income were associated with the greatest increases in brain surface area among the poorest children.
…I am part of a team of social scientists and neuroscientists planning a large clinical trial in which 1,000 low-income mothers will be randomly assigned to receive either a large ($333) or small ($20) monthly income supplement for the first three years of their children’s lives. Periodic assessments of the children and their mothers will enable us to estimate the impact of these cash supplements on children’s cognitive, emotional and brain development, as well as the effect on family functioning.
…Our clinical trial is designed to provide strong evidence regarding whether and how poverty reduction promotes cognitive and brain development. This study, however, will take at least five years to complete — far too long for young children living in poverty today. We should not wait until then to push for policies that can help inoculate young children’s pliable brains against the ravages of poverty.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
Her policy suggestions seem to me to be based quite a bit on emotion, and some of them do not even (to me) seem related to children’s brain development. This makes me concerned that perhaps she is so emotionally attached to her preferred policy solutions that she is pre-committed to finding that poverty causes small surface area of the cerebral cortex, rather than finding that the correlation comes from income and brain characteristics being correlated between parents and children. This my be an example of a study where only a positive finding will be published; a null finding may never see the light of day.
I am glad that she wants to do a controlled experiment. If the results come out the way she would like, then it will be an important finding. I would be happy to volunteer to help audit the study.
Does this even pass the smell test? Talk about ‘normative sociology’.
Almost everyone in the past was significantly poorer than most people today, and in many important ways their rich were poorer than our poor, and probably more susceptible to the vagaries of conflict, disease, and climatic and agricultural conditions, and consequential material deprivation. Nevertheless, there were apparently plenty of well-developed brains that left us legacies of genius.
Furthermore, plenty of us have recent ancestors who certainly grew up in very destitute and precarious conditions, and yet never seemed to strike us as noticeably having much less on the ball than their better-resources descendants.
Looks like the cart of policy is coming in front of the horse of science, which is definitely bad for the science. Score another point in favor of a new radical skepticism.
It’s also strange that this will apparently only take five years to do. Are we going to give these kids IQ tests in kindergarten and call it a day?
This falls into a lot of research in this area that doesn’t bother to look at what happens after puberty, even though this appears to be the event that causes lots of adult IQ difference. Lot of gains from this or that intervention disappear after puberty, and of course there are lots of difference in how and when people go through puberty that could feasibly be studied and yield interesting results. It would also measure what we care about a lot more (adult IQ necessary for functioning in modern society).
Seems a bit uncharitable. Announcing that you’re working on a big important RCT that will definitively prove a specifically stated important connection that you’re talking up in the Post seems like a pretty good way of reducing publication bias. Certainly more than most people are doing. If there’s no publication 5 years from now, we can draw the appropriate inferences.
Are you going to remember to draw the appropriate conclusion five years from now?
Associate professor of neuroscience and education?
Anyway, shouldn’t they use more than $4K/yr? And shouldn’t they use fewer than 1000 subjects?
What would be the mechanism? Nutrition? I cannot see anything other than nutrition that could be causal and good nutrition does not cost much at all.
BTW I am for a BIG of $200/week for all adult US citizens to replace SANP, TANF, housing assistance and some other anti-poverty programs.
I forgot to list Minimum wage in there.
Also if such a program would have such a result I would work more on getting money to low income parents.
Maybe the high number of subjects is for the followup surveys on what they spent the money on.
It would be cool if we could get a rider from the grant agency. Their study costs over $2M per year. I think we could beat it for the price of vitamins, magnesium, and fish oil. Maybe air filters and distilled water if we want to get fancy.
What is the mechanism?!? It’s not nutrition, duh. The causality runs in the opposite direction. It’s low IQ causing poverty, and the small brain is causing the low IQ.
Yes. You are basically saying it is genetics. Nutrition is saying there might be a little epigenetics involved. This is only as opposed to environmental enrichment and other things that are most likely small effects, but who knows?
If Ms. Noble had found a correlation of brain size with square feet of dwelling, would she be arranging a study where poor families are assigned randomly to large or small apartments?
Brain size may be related to weight. Would she be fattening up kids at random to see if they become smarter? Or fattening the parents?
A joke:
A scientist studies jumping in fleas.
He measures the height of jump in a flea.
He removes two legs and notes a lower jump.
He removes two more legs and notes an even lower jump.
He removes the last two legs and notes that there is no jump.
His conclusion: The fewer legs on a flea, the less is the desire to jump.