Berkley nut claims poverty is rotting kids' brains

Berkley nut claims poverty is rotting kids' brains

Dear Friend,

If you've learned anything from me, I hope you've learned this: sometimes (and more often than I'd care to admit), science has more to do with politics than with scientific fact. Case in point: a new "study" claiming that some brain functions of low-income children are nowhere near as developed as those of wealthy children.

The study's lead researcher, cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama even claimed the brain function of the low-income kids was "a similar pattern to what's seen in patients with strokes that have led to lesions in their prefrontal cortex."

It should surprise absolutely no one that this research was done by a psychologist who is based out of the University of California-Berkley – Ground Zero for all left-wing thought in the U.S. So it's no wonder that this "study" underscores all of the typical Berkley talking points on class warfare.

This goal of this barely veiled leftist propaganda is to implant the idea that an entire generation of children are essentially being given brain damage by "the system." This assertion helps give credence to the left's notions of wealth re-distribution.

In this study, 26 children (wow, such a huge sample group!) had their brain function measured with an electroencephalograph (EEG) as they watched a series of images on a computer. The kids were instructed to press a button whenever they saw a triangle on the screen. The low-income kids were less efficient at finding tilted triangles and blocking out distractions.

So … after a "test" of a whopping 26 children, this intense research – which probably took about one afternoon to complete – has determined that low-income kids in this country are irreparably brain damaged? I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it.

A USA Today article on this study points out that "researchers have long pointed to the ravages of malnutrition, stress, illiteracy, and toxic environments in low-income children's lives." The problem with this statement is that, only one of these issues can be blamed on the socioeconomic status of the children in question: malnutrition. For the others, there's no excuse.

If there's one thing liberals love to do, it's to tell people that the system is to blame for their problems. And this politically motivated study would like to give an entire group of children an excuse to fail.

Before we condemn a generation of underprivileged kids to years of liberal tripe about how they've got no chance in life because poverty wrecked their brains, maybe the researchers at Berkley – or the editors of the Journal of Cognative Neuroscience, who will publish the findings of this specious study in 2009 – should test their theory on more than 26 kids.

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.
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