How Income Affects the Brain

For this study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas scanned the brains of 304 people aged 20 to 89. The researchers were looking for two things: first, how much gray matter the subjects had in their brains; second, how their brain networks were organized. In the brain, areas that have related functions often show similar activity: The areas that control speech, for example, tend to interact more with each other and less with the areas involved in different bodily functions. It’s generally considered to be a good thing for brain networks to be “segregated” in this way.