Where You Live And Work Determines What You Are

This month the Progressive Magazine has a fascinating column by Babara Ehrenreich, author of Bait and Switch, which, unfortunately, is not found in the online version.

The bottom line is this: the brain works better when the individual is in an environment that is creative, challenging, and pleasant rather than one that is sterile and forbidding.

The implications are astounding.  Workers confined to cubicles and closets cannot be productive and creative.  Children in barren schools and domestic squalor cannot learn and contribute to society.

How novel an idea.

Ehrenreich came about this conclusion from an article in Seed Magazine that documented the research of Professor Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University:

The naturalistic habitat that Gould has created for these marmosets is essential to her studies, which involve understanding how the environment affects the brain. Eight years after Gould defied the entrenched dogma of her science and proved that the primate brain is always creating new neurons, she has gone on to demonstrate an even more startling fact: The structure of our brain, from the details of our dendrites to the density of our hippocampus, is incredibly influenced by our surroundings. Put a primate under stressful conditions, and its brain begins to starve. It stops creating new cells. The cells it already has retreat inwards. The mind is disfigured.

The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate’s particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain—and Gould’s team has shown that they do—then the playing field isn’t level. Poverty and stress aren’t just an idea: they are an anatomy. Some brains never even have a chance...

... To understand how neurogenesis—the process of creating new brain cells— works, Gould’s lab studies the effect of two separate variables: stress and enriched environments. Chronic stress, predictably enough, decreases neurogenesis. As Christian Mirescu, one of Gould’s post-docs, put it, “When a brain is worried, it’s just thinking about survival. It isn’t interested in investing in new cells for the future.”

On the other hand, enriched animal environments—enclosures that simulate the complexity of a natural habitat—lead to dramatic increases in both neurogenesis and the density of neuronal dendrites, the branches that connect one neuron to another. Complex surroundings create a complex brain...

...“Poverty is stress,” she says, with more than a little passion in her voice. “One thing that always strikes me is that when you ask Americans why the poor are poor, they always say it’s because they don’t work hard enough, or don’t want to do better. They act like poverty is a character issue.”

Gould’s work implies that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. Because neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise above them, the monotonous stress of living in a slum literally limits the brain...

...On a cellular level, the scars of stress can literally be healed by learning new things. Genia Kozorovitskiy, an effusive graduate student who began working with Gould as a Princeton undergrad, has studied the effects of various environments on their colony of marmosets. As predicted, putting marmosets in a plain cage—the kind typically used in science labs—led to plain-looking brains. The primates suffered from reduced neurogenesis and their neurons had fewer interconnections.

However, if these same marmosets were transferred to an enriched enclosure—complete with branches, hidden food, and a rotation of toys—their adult brains began to recover rapidly. In under four weeks, the brains of the deprived marmosets underwent radical renovations at the cellular level. Their neurons demonstrated significant increases in the density of their connections and amount of proteins in their synapses. (emphasis added)

Comments

[Nate]

While the details are indeed thought provoking, this is ceratinly not new. Elizabeth Gould's research has given teeth, evidence, etc to 1950's theories of mind. Gould offers some strong concrete facts for the theorizing that gave us constructivism.

The strength of Gould, IMHO, is that it takes the debate out of the highly individualistic framing of the contructivism, and looks at environment from an 'activity, contextual, or embedded perspective'.

The reason from a developmental perspective this work is important is it shows empirically we are not hardwired. The brain is dynamic and is as much a cultural as a biological organ. It shows development is culturally mediated not a one way path. Different modalities are valued in different cultures and similar ones have different functions. As importantly there are contexts, experiences, behaviors that retard development and can have real consequences on the cellular level. Yet, I see this more of a story of hope than earlier such studies. Even if we have kids in less than optimal evironments, those alternate evironments (education, after school etc.) can alter and correct some of those deficiencies.