How Poverty Taxes The Brain

[devils chaplain]

Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you’re more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It’s why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky....

This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time....

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

Full Article: [link]http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/[/link]

As someone who in the past has spent many years with the psychic burden of worrying about meeting basic needs haunting him day and night, this very much rings true.

[annabanana]

1. Perhaps finally quantifying it will make it less of a

"No DUH" to the chattering classes.

Poverty is an all encompassing, totally exhausting, completely enervating condition. It is the hardest job there is.

[xchrom]

2. you'd think this would be an easy concept. nt

[devils chaplain]

3. I think many who haven't "been there" wouldn't understand. n/t

[adirondacker]

6. But many pretend to. nt

[orpupilofnature57]

4. It's the stacked deck, that aide for Education helps .

[jwirr]

5. This is vaguely why free lunches were started in schools. We understood the consequences of going

to school hungry.

[CrispyQ]

7. Now we begrudge the kids a free hot lunch,

while Wall St. loots the treasury to pay for martini lunches. I don't think I've ever seen such perverted values as this country has. No money to care for our citizens, but we're about to start another war & how to pay for it isn't even mentioned. I cannot remember being this disgusted with our political system.

[jwirr]

8. Exactly.

[valerief]

9. Researchers from universities who get tax dollars instead of the poor cite the obvious

again and nothing will come of it. Well, except that, those who don't need tax dollars get them and those who do need tax dollars won't. More of the same. The research was probably commissioned by the .01% to ensure their plan of human enslavement is working as designed.