[Reblog] How poverty shapes the brain

From the 30 March 2015 ScienceBlog post

Family income is associated with children’s brain structure, reports a new study in Nature Neuroscience coauthored by Teachers College faculty member Kimberly Noble. The association appears to be strongest among children from lower-income families.

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“We can’t say if the brain and cognitive differences we observed are causally linked to income disparities,” said Noble, who currently is both a TC Visiting Professor and Director of the Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab of Columbia University Medical Center, but will join TC’s faculty as Associate professor of Neuroscience and Education in July in the Department of Biobehavioral Sciences. “But if so, policies that target poorest families would have the largest impact on brain development.”

The results do not imply that a child’s future cognitive or brain development is predetermined by socioeconomic circumstances, the researchers said.
Read more at http://scienceblog.com/77532/how-poverty-shapes-the-brain/#FpSAIVrhPFfM4hGJ.99

[News article]Stop Looking For ‘Hardwired’ Differences In Male And Female Brains | Popular Science

Stop Looking For ‘Hardwired’ Differences In Male And Female Brains | Popular Science.

Excerpt

…many supposed psychological differences between the sexes are as illusory as the physical ones. In 2005, Janet Hyde, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzed data from studies of apparent sex differences in traits such as aggression, social ability, math, and moral reasoning. Nearly four fifths of the traits showed only a minor or negligible difference between men and women.

In the rare cases where actual psychological differences exist, they cannot be attributed to innate neurology alone. Everything in the brain is a combination of nature and nurture. Culture comes into play, which affects behavior, which then affects the brain. From birth (and even in the womb), a baby is labeled as a girl or boy and treated a certain way as a result. For example, a 2005 study of 386 birth announcements in Canadian newspapers showed that parents tend to say they’re “proud” when it’s a boy and “happy” when it’s a girl. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist at Brown University, has shown that mothers talk to infant girls more than infant boys. This could partly explain why girls tend to have better language skills later on. “Some differences end up fairly entrenched in adult human beings,” Fausto-Sterling says. “But that doesn’t mean that you were born that way or that you were born destined to be that way.”

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[Reblog] Are the Brains of Introverts and Extroverts Actually Different?

From the 27 August 2013 post at Discover Magazine

By Ben Thomas

Introversion, it seems, is the Internet’s current meme du jour. Articles on introverts are nothing new, of course—The Atlantic’s 2003 classic “Caring for Your Introvert” still gets passed around Facebook on a regular basis—but the topic has gained some sort of strange critical mass in the past few weeks, and has been popping up everywhere from Gawker to Forbes.

This latest swarm of articles ranges from glorified personality quizzes (31 Unmistakable Signs That You’re An Introvert”) to history lessons (“16 Outrageously Successful Introverts”) to business essays (“Why Introverts Can Make Excellent Executives”) to silly, self-aware send-ups of the trend itself (“15 Unmistakable, Outrageously Secret Signs You’re an Extrovert”). The vast majority of them also come packaged with the assumption the reader understands the basic concept of introversion, and already has a pretty clear idea of whether he or she is an introvert or an extrovert.

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The Science of Personality

In short, although the science of personality is still in the relative Dark Ages, researchers have begun to draw links between what these structural and functional brain differences between personality types might mean in terms of their respective peccadilloes.

But brain differences that correlate with introversion or extroversion don’t necessarily show which of these differences—if any—cause introversion or extroversion. “We don’t have experiments that really address whether those brain differences play a causal role,” Castro says. “We’re still pretty far from having … a scientific description of personality differences at the level of cells and synapses.”

And it’s important to keep in mind that our brain structures vary from person to person along all sorts of axes that inform our personalities—not just introversion and extroversion. As the science of brain mapping develops, maybe we’ll have a myriad of new spectrums we can use to describe our personalities in terms of our gray matter.

Related articles

• David Hassell: Are Introverts Smarter Than Extroverts? (internetsuccess4you.wordpress.com)
• Ambivert Represent! (cszinegh.wordpress.com)