Low income damages children’s brains, says study. If so, that’s a tragedy

The link between wealth and attainment is a subject that’s close to my heart, or perhaps more accurately my cerebral cortex. Like 20 per cent of the population I was raised in technical poverty. My first home was a touring caravan. It’s safe to say that no statistician would have expected me to amount to anything – especially if they’d had access to the findings of a new study in Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers have found that there is an association between low family income and the structure of the brains of children. The study looked at the relationship between wealth and the size of the brain’s surface area. The measurements were derived from a method of analysing of biological form called morphometrics. I can’t stress too strongly that this has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of phrenology beloved by racists. Nor does it lead us into the minefield of IQ tests.

The income/brain size association isn’t a new discovery.