Poverty Impairs Working Memory
By Countercurrents.org
17 October, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Billions are crushed by poverty while an absolute minority section makes fabulous amount of profit in this world order. Poverty not only is intolerable and unbearable for an individual or a group of individuals. It also demolishes creativity and working capacity of human being, which is a loss for entire humanity.
Poverty can impair working memory while physical abuse can raise risk of cardiovascular disease, scientists claim. Alok Jha, science correspondent, reports in The Guardian[1]:
Adversity in early childhood – in the form of anything from poverty to physical abuse – has measurable changes in the function of the brain and body well into adulthood, according to researchers.
Growing up in worse socioeconomic circumstances can impair working memory as an adult and affect the size of different parts of the brain, while abuse can lead to a higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease in later life, they report.
In a series of presentations at the annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience in New Orleans on October 16, 2012, scientists reported on work studying critical periods of development for the brain. Eric Pakulak, at the University of Oregon, found that people who grew up in homes with a lower socioeconomic status had greater deficits in working memory, compared with those from wealthier homes, even when he controlled for the participants' education.
Working memory, Pakulak said, was broadly associated with general intelligence. "As a four- or five-year-old, if you have very good attention and regulations skills, it's a foundational skill that would spill over into other areas of cognition – if you're trying to learn your letters, or to read, or learning numbers or math or a musical instrument. When you're learning a musical instrument, you're really training attention."
He asked 72 adults to complete a test of working memory, where they had to remember the final words from a series of sentences. On average, adults from lower socioeconomic backgrounds could remember two words whereas those from more wealthy backgrounds, on average, got up to four words.
Suzanne Houston, of the University of Southern California, showed that the size of different parts of the brain could be affected by growing up in different homes. "We found higher parent education, smaller amygdala. The higher the income, the larger the hippocampus."
The overall size of brain regions was not of primary significance, she said, but the fact they were measurably different would allow scientists to tease out what sorts of differing environmental factors might be affecting the brain development of children from different backgrounds.
Layla Banihashemi, of the University of Pittsburgh, focused on the enduring effects of physical abuse in childhood. She found that adults who suffered physical abuse as children had greater increases in blood pressure when they engaged in stressful tasks as adults. Overall, she said, this would put them at greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
She asked 155 healthy adults, who were 40 years old on average, to complete a childhood trauma questionnaire, a standard way of assessing the level of physical abuse someone may have suffered as a child. "As physical abuse scores increased from none to moderate to severe levels, we saw significant increases in the change in blood pressure in response to stress," said Banihashemi.
The mean arterial blood pressure in people, who had suffered no abuse during childhood changed by 2.73mmHg, from a baseline of around 90mmHg, when they were stressed in Banihashemi's experiment. In the low abuse group, the average change was 4.71mmHg, and moderate or severe abuse in childhood elicited an average change of 5.45 mmHg. "People that have these heightened blood pressure responses, in magnitude and duration, are more at risk at developing cardiovascular disease," she said.
And, poverty is powerful. It determines many “things” in society, economy and politics. In the US, the country once considered a dreamland by many, is now almost overburdened with poverty, which is making impact in politics. Firsthand encounters with poverty shocks and pains any human soul.
Gary Younge in Fort Collins, Colorado reports[2]:
The first visit to the food bank is always the hardest. Michelle Venus, 52, cried. "Not while I was there," she said. "But before and after." Four years earlier, she'd been a homeowner in a $75,000 a year job. She'd donated to the food bank's fundraising drives. Now she was there to pick up food she couldn't afford to buy. "It was not what I'd expected for myself or from myself. It was just a really hard day."
Mark Weaver, 54, the former chairman of nearby Loveland chamber of commerce, tried to avoid the gaze of acquaintances he'd met when he attended the food bank's galas. "It was very humiliating," he says. "I used to take clients to their events, and all of a sudden I'm living below the poverty line." He used to earn a six-figure salary plus commission plus benefits, and also chaired the Northern Colorado Legislative Alliance, which lobbied local politicians on behalf of the business community. He made up his mind to go after a friend, a well-paid software engineer who'd also fallen on hard times, told him to: "Get over being proud."
The queue at the Larimer County food bank in Fort Collins, a town of 147,000 in northern Colorado, snakes out of the door and is mostly silent. In line there are slightly more people than trolleys. The number of families visiting here has increased more than 50% over the last five years. On average they also visit more often and need more food.
People often think they know what poverty looks like until they end up here, and then they realize it looks like them and many other people that they know. Weaver lives in a nice area. The first he knew that his next-door neighbor was struggling with his mortgage payments was when his house was foreclosed on and he was moving out.
The official poverty rate in the US has risen 19% since 2000 with just under one in seven Americans now poor and one in five reporting they did not have enough money to buy food last year.
But since the beginning of the financial crisis it is the 'precarity rate' that has really taken off – the number of people who feel economically precarious. Those who fear poverty, look it straight in the eye at the end of every month, face a constant battle to avoid it or slip in and out of it while struggling to retain every semblance of middle-class stability. People who may have high school diplomas, college degrees, pensions, good credit and mortgages, juggling aspiration and reality, who find themselves one lay-off or illness away from a steep and dizzying descent into hardship.
More than the half the people who use the Larimer County Food Bank are working. One in 10 have at least a college degree, almost a third have no health insurance and more than half have unpaid medical bills.
"There's been a real difference, not only in the number of people that we serve in recent years," explains Amy Pezzani, the food bank's executive director. "But also in the kind of people we serve. People think that if they're not living in poverty then they're middle class. But the official poverty level is such an unrealistic indicator of economic status. Most of the people who use the food bank are working people. These used to be referred to as 'emergency food pantries', but now it's like people are having an emergency every day. It's really just a way to exist."
Last year the census bureau released a new measurement of poverty, which takes regional cost of living, medical payments and other expenses into account and found a third of Americans are either in poverty or desperately close to it. Half are married, almost half are suburban. "These numbers are higher than we anticipated," Trudi Renwick, the bureau's head poverty statistician, told the New York Times. "There are more people struggling than the official numbers show."
This is the fragile economic terrain on which the election is being fought: the needs and aspirations of the ever-expanding numbers of America's working poor and the far larger ranks of those anxious about joining them.
These are the people most likely to be offended by Mitt Romney's suggestion that 47% of the country see themselves as victims, who most needed the kind of change Obama promised four years ago, and have been least impressed by the apparent lack of it. These are the people at whom the ads attacking Romney's record of outsourcing and asset-stripping at Bain Capital were aimed.
They are also the ones the Tea Party sought to galvanize through their populist message against the bailout and in defense of small business. A New York Times poll in 2010 revealed that more than half of those who identified as Tea Party supporters were concerned that someone in their household would be out of a job in the next year, while more than two-thirds said the recession had been difficult or caused hardship and major life changes.
In Larimer County, where between 2006 and 2010 median family income (adjusted for inflation) shrank by 9% leaving around a third of homeowners paying 30% or more of their income for housing.
The number of people using food stamps, and applying for heating assistance over the last six years has rocketed. Over the past 10 years the number of children getting free and reduced lunch doubled, while in-state tuition fees at Colorado State University, which has a huge campus in town, increased 138%.
The Fort Collins Homelessness Prevention Initiative, which provides one-time grants for emergency rent assistance, has seen a 50% increase in the number of people they are helping every year.
"If you took all the money they spent on the political system and elections you could feed the world," Mark Weaver, a voter, says.
Mark's fortunes began to change in the summer of 2009 when was a human resources manager in a company with 1,500 employees. He was let go and replaced by a colleague 20 years his junior on half his salary. He could have found other work elsewhere in the country, but that would have involved uprooting his three children, and he didn't think that was fair. He got another job in a start-up that involved a long commute and eventually collapsed owing him money. With his mortgage paid off and no debts, the biggest expense for a family of five was healthcare. Since everyone in the family was healthy they contemplated doing without it.
Then his youngest daughter got bitten by a rattlesnake. "That would have been a six-figure healthcare bill," he says. "If we'd gotten rid of healthcare at that point we would have been sunk." It was around that time he started going to the food bank. He stopped after he got a job at a major bookstore as a night-time accountant and head cashier paying just $9 an hour but with good health benefits, and is now getting a human resources consultancy practice off the ground.
Michelle, on the other hand, was devastated. "I was heartbroken," she says. "I was highly offended. I thought he's just disrespected me personally. I just don't think the Republican Party cares about people like me." Michelle describes herself as a lifelong Democrat. She had not long moved to the Fort Collins area when her husband was diagnosed with brain cancer. They had health insurance, but with only one salary coming in they ate through their savings just to keep afloat. "We raided our personal accounts to survive."
She got a job in marketing paying $75,000 a year and remained relatively comfortable in the 2,400 sq ft house she was buying. Then she lost that job and went into consulting. "I just kept going," she says. "I lived through recessions before, and assumed I'd come out the other side." But work was drying up and when her boyfriend of six years killed himself last March she struggled to keep up. "After that I'd get up to feed my dogs but that was about it." When a client complained that she wasn't meeting deadlines she texted back: "I'm just not trying to kill myself."
Struggling to pay the mortgage on the house, which had been sold on from her bank to a loan company, she tried to renegotiate. In a conference call with an adviser and the lender, she was told that it made more sense to foreclose on her than change the terms of the loan. "I stopped paying the mortgage and got the house ready to sell," she says. She managed to sell it for a small profit and move into a place less than half the size with her son. It was around this time she found herself crying as she prepared to go to the food bank. "I just couldn't make ends meet," she says. "I don't go every week. Just when I really need something. When I first went I was worried that I would see people I knew. "
Now she's starting a new career as a journalist and has scaled down considerably and muddles through.
She thinks things are getting better.
The ramifications of the inability of the nation's political culture to engage with this increasingly pervasive sense of fragility go beyond the immediate election. Since the financial crisis began five years ago, the significant shift in Americans' economic wellbeing has posed a considerable challenge to both national mythology and the political rhetoric on which it is built.
Among other things, the American dream rests on the notion of meritocracy and progress – that those who work hard will get on, that each year will better than the last and each generation better off than their parents'. Since 1977, when Gallup first asked if people thought they would be personally better off the following year, an overwhelming majority say yes every year, even though there have been four recessions. It's not a guarantee of success – indeed, quite the opposite. Inequality of wealth, and the poverty that comes with it, is tolerable on the understanding that there will be equality of opportunity. While only 2% described themselves as "rich", 31% thought it very likely or somewhat likely they would "ever be rich".
But the recent downturn has delivered a severe dent to that self-image. A report earlier this year showed that between 2007 and 2010 the median American family lost a generation of wealth. Most Americans believe it unlikely that young people will have a better life than their parents – the highest on record.
Meanwhile, as the National Journal's Ron Brownstein made clear recently, the sclerotic effects of class entrenchment are becoming ever more deeply embedded. In a study called 'Pathways to the middle class', Sawhill and two colleagues pointed out that nearly two-thirds of children born to parents in the bottom fifth of income stay in that category as adults, while more than three-fifths of children born into families in the top fifth remain in theirs.
Source:
[1] “Childhood adversity affects adult brain and body functions, researchers find”, Oct. 16, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/16/childhood-adversity-adult-brain-functions
[2] guardian.co.uk, “Colorado's working poor: 'Suddenly, I'm living below the poverty line'”, Oct. 16, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/16/colorado-working-poor-elections-2012
Comments are moderated
