Madeline Ostrander writes: The brain\u2019s foundation, frame, and walls are built in the womb. As an embryo grows into a fetus, some of its dividing cells turn into neurons, arranging themselves into layers and forming the first synapses, the organ\u2019s electrical wiring. Four or five months into gestation, the brain\u2019s outermost layer, the cerebral cortex, begins to develop its characteristic wrinkles, which deepen further after birth. It isn\u2019t until a child\u2019s infant and toddler years that the structures underlying higher-level cognition\u2014will power, emotional self-control, decision-making\u2014begin to flourish; some of them continue to be fine-tuned throughout adolescence and into the first decade of adulthood.<\/p>\n
Pat Levitt, a developmental neuroscientist at Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles, has spent much of his career studying the setbacks and accidents that can make this construction process go awry. In the nineteen-nineties, during the media panic over \u201ccrack babies,\u201d he was among a number of scientists who questioned whether the danger of cocaine exposure in utero was being overstated. (Levitt spent two decades examining the brains of rabbit mothers and their offspring that were dosed with the drug, and says that the alarm was \u201can exaggeration.\u201d) More recently, as the science director of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, he has become interested in another sort of neurotoxin: poverty.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, the conditions that attend poverty\u2014what a National Scientific Council report summarized as \u201covercrowding, noise, substandard housing, separation from parent(s), exposure to violence, family turmoil,\u201d and other forms of extreme stress\u2014can be toxic to the developing brain, just like drug or alcohol abuse.\u00a0 Poverty and the Developing Brain<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Madeline Ostrander writes: The brain\u2019s foundation, frame, and walls are built in the womb. As an embryo grows into a fetus, some of its dividing cells turn into neurons, arranging themselves into layers and forming the first synapses, the organ\u2019s … Continue reading ![\"Poverty](\"http:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Poverty-and-the-Developing-Brain.jpg\")
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