How does income affect childhood brain development? | Kimberly Noble

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2019

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Neuroscientist and pediatrician Kimberly Noble is leading the Baby's First Years study: the first-ever randomized study of how family income changes children's cognitive, emotional and brain development. She wants to find out: Can we help kids in poverty simply by giving families more money? "The brain is not destiny," Noble says. "And if a child's brain can be changed, then anything is possible."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features neuroscientist and pediatrician Kimberly Noble, recorded live at
0:07.4	TED Salon, Education Everywhere, 2019.
0:12.7	What I'm about to share with you are findings from a study of the brains of more than 1,000
0:18.5	children in adolescents.
0:20.3	Now, these were children who were recruited from diverse homes
0:23.1	around the United States,
0:24.8	and this picture is an average of all of their brains.
0:28.6	The front of this average brain is on your left,
0:30.7	and the back of this average brain is on your right.
0:33.5	Now, one of the things we were very interested in
0:36.0	was the surface area of the cerebral cortex,
0:39.3	where the thin, wrinkly layer on the outer surface of the brain that does most of the cognitive
0:43.9	heavy lifting.
0:46.9	And that's because, past work by other scientists has suggested that in many cases, a larger
0:52.4	cortical surface area is often associated with higher intelligence. Now, in many cases, a larger cortical surface area
0:54.2	is often associated with higher intelligence.
0:57.7	Now, in this study, we found one factor
1:00.7	that was associated with the cortical surface area
1:03.4	across nearly the entire surface of the brain.
1:08.3	That factor was family income.
1:12.7	Now here, every point you see in color is a point where higher family income
1:16.9	was associated with a larger cortical surface area in that spot.
	...

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