Does Poverty Make You Dumb? What Not Having Enough Does To The Brain

Poverty, at its most extreme, kills — people all over the world die from causes related to malnutrition and from a lack of access to healthcare. 

On a global level, diseases that remain untreated as a direct result of poverty — diseases such as HIV, diarrhea, tuberculosis, pneumonia, malaria and other tropical diseases — are responsible for an awful lot of deaths that could have been prevented, if only people had physical and financial access to healthcare services and medications.

Often, though, poverty affects health, and health affects poverty, in slightly less obvious ways. Perhaps that direly-needed trip to the doctor was indeed made, but medical bills mean some family members can't continue to go to school, continuing the cycle of poverty. Perhaps a family has enough to eat, but is forced to cook its food on open fires or traditional stoves, causing fumes that lead to respiratory diseases. Perhaps living in crowded circumstances with low levels of hygiene constantly makes people ill, and perhaps looking after ill family members deprives them of the opportunity to make money that would otherwise raise the family above poverty. 

Poverty Makes The Brain Smaller?

Neuroscientists Kimberly Noble from Columbia University in New York City and Elizabeth Sowell from Children's Hospital Los Angeles, California, led the largest-ever study into how poverty affects the brain. Published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in March 2015, the study examined the brains of 1,099 children, adolescents and young adults in cities across the United States using imaging techniques. 

What's more, differences were profound even within the low-income group itself. Young people from poor families who made even a few thousand dollars a year extra were found to have better language and decision-making skills. 

Though the study doesn't show how changes in income level affect brains over time, it does demonstrate that the consequences of poberty reach beyond physical health. But just when do these effects set in? Martha Farah , a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and her colleagues conducted another study, so far unpublished, in which they imaged the brains of 44 month-old African American girls from various economic bakgrounds in Philadelphia. Amazingly, the poorer baby girls were found to have physically smaller brains even at this tender age.

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Farah's study is still ongoing at this point — she and her colleagues hope to continue tracking these girls until they are two years old, visiting their homes and studying how their home environments affect their cognitive outcomes. At the moment, it seems like the stress, poorer nutrition, and lower quality medical care their mothers experienced during pregnancy left their marks on the poorer babies before they were even born.

Does Poverty Affect IQ, Or Does It Just Seem That Way?

Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir worked on the book Scarcity, which examines how a shortage of stuff we need affects our decision-making abilities, together. Their basic premise was that lacking things impacts the way in which we make decisions, whether we lack food, time, social interaction, or other basics humans don't do well without. 

The pair administered the Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests — essentially an IQ test that doesn't require either knowledge or experience — to people in New Jersey. Before they started the tests, they seperated people into rich and poor, based on the income they reported. 

They then asked participants to consider a scenario presented to them just before taking the test: "Imagine you’ve got car trouble and repairs cost $300. Your auto insurance will cover half the cost. You need to decide whether to go ahead and get the car fixed,or take a chance and hope that it lasts for a while longer. How would you make this decision? Financially, would it be easy or hard?"

The outcome? Well, there were no statistically significant differences in performance between the rich and poor groups. But then, the research team repeated the tests, asking partipants to consider the exact same circumstances again, except this time, the repairs cost $3,000. 

What does this mean? Well, it appears to mean that financial stress causes underperformance that a lack of financial stress doesn't, even if the financial stress is only hypothetical. This research strongly suggests that the fairly prevalent idea that poverty is the fault of poor people is wrong — being placed under significant financial stress affects someone's ability to perform well in a very real way, and who can think about how to make upward mobility (or "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps") happen when actual life stresses mess with their brain?

Why Bother When It's Hopeless?

None of these studies explain why so many poor people make "bad decisions" — or do they? Shafir, from the study above, says: "When you're struggling, poor ... a lot of the day is not so much fun. And people fail to appreciate the fact that when I buy myself a big ice cream, or a small gift" — something he says many people criticize the poor for doing — "I'm giving myself a nice minute after a complicated week, which is a good thing to do."

To see how this works, we may have to leave the academic world behind and look at the real world. Why do poor people make "bad decisions", decisions that more well-off folks believe keep them in poverty? Why don't poor people "just" make use of the free opportunities out there, avoid expensive and detrimental habits like fast food and smoking, and save money where they can?

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Poor people all over the world face different challenges, challenges that affect their health and their brain. What would happen if we would collectively take these challenges and their consequences as seriously as we've taken HIV, ebola, and even obesity?