36 CHAPTER ONE
sense of the plasticity of the brain, scientists, scholars, and policymakers
call forth particular configurations of bodies, brain matter, measurements,
and other practices. I find this a useful way to think about the problem
of the gendered brain, or, in the example I want to elaborate, the neural
phenotype of poverty.
Poverty as a Neural Phenotype
In the series of studies I mentioned above, social neuroscientists have
argued that because of their distinct patterns of experience, a particular
neural pattern distinguishes the brains of poor from middle- class children
(Farah, Shera, et al. 2006; Farah, Noble, et al. 2006; Hackman and Farah
2009; Hackman et al. 2010; Noble et al. 2005). This neural pattern is found
in particular “brain systems,” which are configurations of structure and
function that have been identified through combinations of cognitive and
neural testing methods. They argue that children with low ses are at risk of
having an impaired language system, which they locate primarily in the left
temporal and frontal areas, and, to a lesser degree, an impaired executive
system, which they argue utilizes the lateral and ventromedial areas of the
prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate. Other brain systems are relatively
untouched; they found no difference in spatial and visual cognition, and
(in contrast to previous findings in the literature) no difference in impulse
control or the ability to delay gratification. This particular configuration
of the brain comprises, as they see it, a neural phenotype of poverty.
Mapping the effects of poverty in the brain does not necessarily fix it there.
The durability of this pattern, they admit, is uncertain: Poverty’s effects
could be contextual, disappearing when the context changes, they could
be habituated, or they could suggest “trait- like features of brain structure
and function” over time (Hackman and Farah 2009, 70). Alternatively,
poverty could be understood not as a characteristic of a person at all, but
rather as a circumstance that has an impact on cognitive performance (Mani^
et al. 2013).^23
There is a large literature on the effects of poverty on childhood devel-
opment, health, academic success, and life prospects. To address this in
specifically neural terms involves the generation and imaging of patterns of
brain activity during cognitive tasks using specific technologies, the nam-
ing of particular brain systems, the creation of cognitive tests that can the-