A recent article by Madeline Ostrander in the New Yorker describes research that examines “what poverty does to the young brain.” One major focus of her article is a recent study that found a link between socioeconomic factors and brain structure in a group of individuals between 3 and 20 years old. Specifically, the study found that in children from low income families, small differences in income were associated with relatively large differences in brain surface area (particularly in areas supporting higher cognitive skills). In children from higher income families, the link between small income differences and brain surface size were weaker, suggesting that, as Ostrander puts it, “wealth can’t necessarily buy a better brain, but deprivation can result in a weakened one.”

Crucially, the study also had participants complete a variety of cognitive tasks; these were also correlated with cortical surface area, and therefore with the socioeconomic factors (though the study did not look directly at brain function during the performance of these tasks). In interpreting their results, the study authors point out that their results are correlation, so “it is unclear what is driving the links between SES and brain structure. Such associations could stem from ongoing disparities in postnatal experience or exposures, such as family stress, cognitive stimulation, environmental toxins or nutrition, or from corresponding differences in the prenatal environment” (Nobel et al., p. 777).

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A particularly nice aspect of Ostrander’s article is that she emphasizes that these are problems that must be handled at a social, rather than an individual level: “The story that science is now telling rearranges the morality of parenting and poverty, making it harder to blame problem children on problem parents. Building a healthy brain, it seems, is an act of barn raising.” Similarly, Nobel and her colleagues stress the importance of policies that aim to reduce family poverty, and describe the ultimate goal of studies like theirs as identifying more precise targets for intervention, “with the ultimate goal of reducing socioeconomic disparities in development and achievement.” This emphasis on the social is in contrast with a tendency in media discussions of epigenetic research (which also addresses the possible effects of stress during pregnancy) to “blame the mothers.”