Poverty as a deterioration of human rights: stress, and psychobiology: Poverty can physically impair brain through stress
Year: 2009
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Having presented two commissioned papers in previous Pugwash International Conferences (Lahti Finland 1996, and Jurita Mexico 1998) on Poverty and on Stress respectively (Ramirez, 1998(Ramirez, , 2001)), my present lines try to show the linking of those concepts to my academic field, the Psychobiology, putting it within the general frame of poverty as a deterioration of human rights.More specifically, it is suggested that chronic stress from growing up in poverty can physiologically impact children's brains, reducing their working memory and diminishing their ability to develop language, reading and problem-solving skills, in few words, impairing their ability to learn.Hopefully, a better knowledge of the mechanisms linking stress to cognitive development -there are some cognitive responses to physiological stress in children who live in poverty -may help in preventing such deterioration.******* I do not pretend that brain research might be the key to explaining why people are poor, but merely to present some interesting correlations related to a factor that seems to be contributing in certain conditions.In fact, establishing cause and effect or correlation is quite tricky, and I have to admit that there may yet be a random correlation between poverty, stress, and short-term memory.However, here we have a start that can be built on, in the hope that it might lead to some deep rethinks of social policy.
Author: Ramirez, J. Martin
Institution: Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Language: English
Subfield: Behavioral Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W327267610