♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: tonight, we continue our ongoing exploration of the human brain with a look at the relationship between childhood adversity and the developing brain. our genes provide the basic blueprint for brain development, but our individual experiences can shape and alter our underlying brain circuitry. traumatic early experiences, in particular, can often have powerful, long-term effects on the brain's structure and function. these life events can include parental abuse, neglect, family violence, poverty, and bullying. deborah temkin understands this issue firsthand.

her experience being bullied as a child led her to pursue a career studying its prevention. she joins me today along with a remarkable group of scientists. charles nelson of harvard medical school. kimberly noble of columbia university. ken dodge of duke university. michael meaney of mcgill university. and, once again, my co-host and my friend, dr. eric kandel. as all of you now know, he is a nobel laureate, a professor at columbia university, and a howard hughes medical investigator. thank you for coming. so what are we going to do today? dr. kandel: well, outline -- charlie: what do we explore? dr. kandel: you outlined it so well, and the last program, we considered competitive sports among young people, and we realized, of course, that in competitive athletics, kids fall down or get pushed down, and sometimes, they suffer concussions as a result of this, in which the brain bashes up against the rigid skull, potentially causing damage to the brain.

today, we are going to see the astonishing fact that you referred to that you can get similar, and in some cases more severe, damage to the brain without altering the position of the brain in the skull, the result of early social and psychological adversities, such as parental abuse, parental neglect, poverty, or bullying. some children who have been brought up in an environment in which they don't have appropriate intellectual stimulation, appropriate bonding with parents actually have pathways that don't develop in the brain, and the hippocampus, the structure critical for cognitive function and for memory, may not reach its normal size. but beyond cognitive abilities, other aspects of people's health are affected as a result of these deprivations in early-childhood experiences. for example, people who have

these early experiences are more susceptible to depression and to suicidal thoughts, more likely to be involved in drugs, more likely to be susceptible to metabolic diseases and to cardiovascular diseases, and the insult need not be severe. even moderate impairment in the the bonding between parents and children can have an effect. how does this come about? what it becomes about is an alteration in gene expression. the dna is present in every cell. the genes are carried in dna. they are present in every single cell and present especially in a compartment called the "nucleus," and in the nucleus, there are two one-meter-long strands of dna, one from the father, one from the mother, and this is an enormous length of dna and poses a problem for the cell. how do we fit these two long stretches of dna into the nucleus?

the way the cell solves the problem is the nucleus does two things. one, it divides the dna into 23 small pieces, and it takes an analogous piece from the father, an analogous piece from the mother, and it combines them into chromosomes, so we have 23 pairs of chromosomes. moreover, we then wrap the dna around spool-like structures, called "nucleosomes," and the whole region is called "chromatin." this tight packing reduces the volume of the dna more. now, the chromatin is beautifully organized, with two key regions. there is a regulatory region that determines whether or not a particular gene will be turned on and a coding region that actually encodes the messenger that gives rise to a protein. now, these regulatory signals of the regulatory regions can be of two kinds. they can be activators, transcriptional activators, or they can be silencers, like the dna methylation. now, normally, for the sperm and the egg, these transcription

factors, these regulatory factors that are activated by environmental experiences, are wiped clean, and the infant starts with a clean slate. so the normal inheritance is you start off with a clean slate, and your own life experiences add and subtract transcription factors in order to activate genes. but, occasionally, very traumatic experiences of the kind that have been described by isabelle mansuy and mike meaney, that we will also discuss, will have an effect of a parent and a child -- for example, depriving the infant mouse of access to its mother that will cause an alteration in gene expression, a shutting off of a gene, a methylation, that can be carried on not just for the life of that infant but for several generations after that. so this damage, in principle, can be carried on for a number of generations, so in addition to having a genetic variance, you can have genetic traits,

which are carried from one generation to another, so simply, to summarize, what is really amazing is these social deprivations early in childhood, childhood adversity, can lead to dna changes that alter the development of the brain, alter healthy stress responses, and give rise to cognitive health consequences or social consequences. to discuss this wonderful topic of seeing how environmental contingencies can affect the brain, we have a terrific group of people. we have charles nelson, who pioneered the study of the living in an orphanage. charlie: let me begin with charles nelson and shaping the brain. mr. nelson: as we already talked about, the basic architecture of the brain is lay down before

birth with the genes a baby inherits from the mother and father. and this forms a blueprint for brain development, and after birth, that blueprint is fundamentally altered by experience. the issue for us is if experiences are good, you can facilitate healthy brain development. but if they are bad, you can facilitate unhealthy brain develop it. perhaps the worst thing you can do is deprive the brain of experiences it needs, particularly experiences that need to occur what we call critical periods, sensitive periods when the brain is receptive to input or experience. if the child's brain goes through that, like neglect early in life, of those, children wind up growing up in institutions, and my colleagues have demonstrated for many years that children who are abandoned at birth, placed in institutions, show dramatic changes in development. for example, we see that kids who grow up in institutions have

an iq of around 66, which is far, far below normal, where his children who have not grown up in institutions have an iq around 100. we have also shown that the risk of having a mental health problem is dramatically increased for kids growing up in institutions. here we show at age 12, children with a history of institutional care, more than 47% of them have a major psychiatric disorder, and that is only 10% of those who are not in a major psychiatric institution. aside iq and psychiatric illness, we also show changes in memory and what we call "executive functions." when we look at the brain, some of the changes in the brain can explain some of the changes we see in behavior. we are looking at a view of the brain from the left side, the left hemisphere. that bundle of blue that you see known as the "cingulum," within temporal lobe, it is connecting

areas that are critically involved in things like memory and emotion macquarie the frontal lobe is involved in regulating emotion and our cognitive state, generally. we find that the integrity of this bundle of fiber is dramatically reduced with those with a history of institutional care. these fibers work less efficiently and less constructively. and that can also explain some of the high rates with mental health problems. the last thing i want to show is that we know that early in life, children with a history of institutional care show fundamental changes in their ability to relate to other people. particularly caregivers. posited that if you have fundamentally altered the relationship children have with their caregivers early on, how does that play out when they are older. on the i have a video of two-year-old boys, one of whom, the one in the white has spent his entire life in an institution, and the one in the stripes is just from

the neighborhood, never been in an institution. we asked them to interact with each other. notice the behavior of the boy on the right. he is aggressive and does not know how to interact. at one point, he basically attacks the other boy. even if you do not speak romanian, you can see how boy'sal this language is. and what we see is not only do the children with institutional care not know how to react, that the other children are essentially turned off by this and want nothing to do with this child, and it is very disturbing to see. charlie: can we do anything about that? mr. nelson: what we will talk about in a minute is what happens when you take these kids out of an institution and put them into foster care. into a good family. charlie: let me talk to kimberly and talk about economic factors impact this development. ms. noble: it impacts them quite a bit. a little bit of background for your viewers.

poverty is defined based on family income. the federal government defines the poverty line each year, and right now, for a family of four, it is right around $25,000, and incidentally, that is the same if the family is living in new york city or in south dakota, even though the cost of living is quite different in those places. despite the fact that it is quite challenging rearing a family of four on $25,000, poverty affects currently one in five children across the u.s. of course, family circumstances combined with more than family income, so when we think about socioeconomic status, we think about not only income but also educational attainment and occupational status. when we talk about socioeconomic status in this way, we know it is associated with a broad range of outcomes that are important from children, ranging from iq to high school graduation. but as neuroscientists, we know these outcomes are very important, but they do not tell us much about the brain.

taking a neuroscience lens, we know that different circuits support different cognitive skills, and so by using a neuroscience framework, we can ask which particular cognitive skills seem to be most associated with family socioeconomic circumstance, and that is exactly what we did in a series of studies about 10 years ago, where we got socio-economically diverse people with children ranging from kindergartners up to adolescence. we asked how do socioeconomic factors predict children's cognitive development? we found a number of different things. first of all, we found that, in general, children from socioeconomically advanced homes outperform children from more disadvantaged homes, in terms of their memory performance. and more recently, we and other investigators have been investigating the way that the very structure of the brain varies as a function of family

socioeconomic background. we have known since the 1950's that a structure in the brain, known as the hippocampus, located deep inside our brains, is critical for brain and memory development. we have also learned that in many cases, a larger hippocampus is associated with better memory skills. we reasoned that children from more advantaged environments would have a larger hippocampus. and that is exactly what we found. as you can see here, the hippocampus is shown in green, and children from homes with greater family incomes tended to have a larger hippocampus size and the children from more economically disadvantaged homes. dr. kandel: it is incredible to know that poverty affects the size of the hippocampus, and therefore memory capabilities. charlie: it is an amazing fact. it shows you how so early in life you can be disadvantaged. dr. kandel: exactly. and, really, we were comparing

this before to physical damage to the brain. what we are seeing is these early deprivations are enormous in consequences to brain function, and this is a brilliant example of that. ms. noble: well, thank you, eric, and this finding has been replicated in for independent labs. it is really important to try to get to the mechanism, try to understand, what is it about growing up in poverty that could lead to these differences, so we can design appropriate interventions. so, for example, with washington university in st. louis, they have suggested that the key to this link might be differences in family. we know that families facing economic disadvantage faced a host of pressures every day. and we have known for quite some time that stress has profound and cascading effects on the development of the hippocampus. differences in family stress may be that link. we know the developing brain is very plastic, so they are

investigating whether these links could be prevented or reversed through intervention. now, our initial studies of children's behavior found other striking differences along socioeconomic lines. we also found socioeconomic differences in language skills as well as differences in executive functioning, or their ability to self regulate or inhibit inappropriate responses. recently, we had the opportunity to explore how these differences in socioeconomic background relate to the very structure of children's brains. so, here you can see a steady that we recently published showing that higher family income was associated with greater brain surface area, or the size of the full of the surface of the brain, which is responsible for most of the cognitive heavy lifting. that is right, the cerebral cortex, or the layer of cells on the outside of the brain. now, here, in this figure, every area that you see represented in

color represents an area where there is an association between family income and the size of the folds in children's brains. furthermore, the areas of yellow are where we see the relationship most strongly. the picture on the left shows the side of the brain. the areas in yellow are part of the frontal and temporal cortex that are responsible for language development. that picture on the right is a picture straight down the middle of the brain, and the areas of yellow are part of the prefrontal cortex that deal with this idea of self-regulation and in inhibiting inappropriate impulses. there are a couple points to note about this finding. first of all, the relationship was not linear, and by that, the strongest links between income and children's brain size occurred among the most disadvantaged families. that means dollar by dollar, any differences in family income were associated with

proportionally greater differences in brain structure among the poorest families. secondly, and this point is really critical, there were dramatic, what we call individual differences. an analogy i like to use is between gender and height. we all know that in childhood, on average, boys tend to be taller than girls, but across america, we will find some girls who are taller than some boys. the analogy is similar here. on average, people from higher income homes tended to have larger brain surface areas than children from more disadvantaged homes. but of course, there is quite a bit of variability with many children from disadvantaged homes having larger brain surface areas and many children from advantaged homes having smaller brain surface areas. so in no way could i know from the child's family income alone predict that particular child's brain size. in the final point i would like to make about these findings is that there are likely multiple mechanisms at play here. our lab is particular interested

in trying to understand how the language exposure that children hear, the quality and quantity of words, as well as differences in family stress, could be accounting for these links. we know the developing brain is a markedly plastic. we have reason to believe that appropriate interventions may be able to reverse or even prevent these effects. along those lines, i am part of a group of social scientists and neuroscientists who are currently raising funds for the first clinical child of poverty reduction, in which we will actually be able to reduce poverty and measure the effect that it has on the developing brain and mind. ♪

♪ we know why it has an impact on some lower income families and not on others? ms. noble: that is part of what we're trying to understand, the science of resilience. i think likely a large part of that has to do with differences in parenting. we know that parenting style can buffer many adversities. that is one of the questions we are pursuing. dr. kandel: another situation could very well be, and you emphasized this, that poverty carries with it a great deal of stress. some people might be able to handle it more successfully than others and the stress itself is very powerful. charlie: how about social factors? >> over the past 30 years, child of element scientists,

like myself, have followed children from childhood into adult blood to identify the experiences that place them at risk. we have identified two experiences within the first five years of life. those children who have been maltreated or abused by parents in the first five years of life, they have been rejected by parents, harshly treated. boys who have experienced maltreatment by parents are likely to become juvenile delinquents on average, and to become arrested for violent crimes in young adulthood. girls are likely to develop a adolescent pattern of deviant behavior that could include unwanted pregnancies. the second kind of abuse is by peers, children who are bullied, victimized, socially rejected, just like by peers in the kindergarten, first, or second grade classrooms are at risk for growing up to the problems in adolescence", including problems

such as suicide, anxiety problems, depression, and even violent reactions. the next question we have, what is it about those experiences that has an impact on children psychologically? how is it that these experiences can lead someone to become violent? to study this problem, we brought children into the laboratory, all kinds of children, children who had been abused, bullies, all kind of children. we exposed them to different experiences, threats, provocations, cheating in games, that sort of thing. or we exposed to virtually by having them watch on video, television shots, and have them imagine being provoked or being threatened. we have identified a pattern of response we call a hyper defensive processing response that children who have been abused experience. this pattern is in some ways, similar to post-traumatic stress symptoms. it consists of several components. the first component is a pattern of hypervigilance to threat

cues. these children become very wary and very quick to respond to any kind of background threat or any kind of provocation. the second is to show bias, where they attribute intend and see threat when it does not objectively exist. but they become very hypervigilant in response. there is a psychophysical logical component. where their heart races in response to ambiguous threats. a fourth part is a testosterone release, which readies them for physical violent and physical reactivity, and the final component is a pattern of anger, anxiety, and hyper retaliatory aggression. now, not all children who experience these early adverse events were going to have these outcomes. we all know about resilience and different kinds of outcomes. one of the factors which determines which children will grow up to have these outcomes and which do not is genes.

it turns out, there is a gene that encodes protein that helps with self-regulation, a mon oamine. polymorphismhave a in that chain are really at risk of going up and become an violent in response to these earlier experiences of abuse. charlie: and deborah temkin, her career in bullying prevention was -- i think inspired is the right word. but connected to your own experiences. ms. temkin: first, i think it is important to define what we are talking about. bullying is not simply conflict between kids. it is not simply teasing or pushing and shoving on the playground. it is, as ken described, and abusive relationship between kids. there is some debate as to the precise definition, but the centers of disease control and prevention released a uniform saysition in 2014 that

broadly, that bullying is repeated aggressive behavior between school-age youth in the context of power balance. that could be anything with differences in size or strength or popularity -- and that behavior is repeated or has a potential to be repeated over time. my story really illustrates each of these components, even though it is far from unique. when i was a middle school student, i was perhaps a little bit geeky, perhaps a little bit nerdy. i probably still am to this day, peers an adolescent, when acceptance is a key behavioral driver, being a little different can leave one very vulnerable. in seventh-grade i had also transferred to a new school and at the time, if you had asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up, i wanted to be a journalist. unfortunately my new school did not have a newspaper. i had enlisted the help of a

girl who had quickly the friended me on the first day of school, as well as my english teacher to start a newspaper. and once it was up and running, my teacher made me the editor of the newspaper over my friend. that did not go over very well. my friend subsequently kicked me out of her lunch table, which, in my particular school, where there were limits to the number of kids who could sit at any particular lunch table, meant that i was, so to speak, homeless and didn't have a place to sit at lunch. this led to a campaign of bullying by this particular girl, as well as others who quickly joined in, seeing this was the cool thing to do, to pick on me. i experienced everything from nasty rumors being spread about me to being called derogatory names, to actually even being spat upon from school bus windows. i was very lucky. we are hearing today about how such trauma can affect children's brains. i will not overshadow. i am definitely still affected by my experience.

i will tell you right now, i still cannot go in a cafeteria and sit by myself, for fear that others are laughing at me or judging me, but i look at how pervasive this issue of bullying is in this world, in this country, and know we have to do something about it. the u.s. department of education just released the newest statistics about bullying, which showed that in the 2014-2015 year, about 21% of kids reported being bullied, and that is quite a significant number of kids. when i look back at my experience, i no longer blame the kids who actually bullied me. we know from the research that kids bully for a number of reasons. often, they are responding to drama in their own life, and they are also responding to a climate in which they are being encouraged to actually bullied as a way to gain popularity or status.

i look back and realize that the teachers and administrators in my school had absolutely no idea what to do, how to intervene and prevent future incidents of violence and bullying, which is why i really have dedicated my career to trying to figure out, how do we equip schools to create safer and more supportive environments? i was lucky to meet kevin jennings, who shared my vision, or, shall i say, i shared his vision of creating those supportive environments. and i soon moved down to d.c. to lead the initiative from 2010 to 2012, where i was involved in spearheading stopbully ing.gov. i also help to coordinate the white house intervention and other summits. i continue to work as a director of education research at child

trends, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the outcomes. ms. temkin: i continue to work as a director of education research at child trends, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the outcomes. charlie: melania trump as expressed interest in bullying as her concern as first lady? ms. temkin: that is right. she said cyber bullying is something she wants to take on. we know that cyber bullying is coordinated with traditional forms, so continuing the work that we have safer school environments is going to continue to be a very important issue carrying on through the next administration. charlie: michael, we see all of this, we see the impact of bullying and the impacts. what is actually happening? what are the mechanics? mr. meaney: right. we see the effects of poverty on brain structure, and there is the obvious question of how this occurs, and there is the fascinating possibility that

these forms of social adversity might be affecting the activity of genes in the brain. eric referred early on as to help it controls the opening and closing of chromatin, and dna which is the process of regulating expression, and dna methylation works with a silencing could we can think of this like a dimmer switch, so as methylation of works with the promoter, the gene becomes increasingly less active, so the higher the level of methylation, the less active, gene. the gene acquires epigenetic marks, so, for example, the epigenetic marks will be different for brain cells, which means the genes are different, and so even though these cells

have the same dna, they take on very, very different functions. that inicking point is , fact, even within the same types of cells, these epigenetic marks can differ between one person to another. and i think think this gives us -- the best example of this is we can look even at identical twins, who share exactly the same dna, but who can come to differ quite extensively. what we know is that as the twins age, they have different experiences. they produce differences in the epigenetic marks. so the patterns of expression -- and, in fact, that is really the key point. that the environment can actually produce subtle changes in the epigenetic marks. we first were studying this by looking at the relationship between the quality of maternal care in a rat and a number of different outcomes, including the activity of genes, and what we found is if you look at the offspring of what we referred as

"nurturing mother," who look theirs quite frequently, this is associated with an increased glucocorticoid receptor in brain regions that regulate in response to stress, so the offspring of these nurturing mothers are less reactive to stress. next image shows an interesting example of how these individual differences can be transmitted from one generation to the next, so if we look at the female offspring of nurturing mothers, they showed decreased methylation of the estrogen receptor gene. the female offspring of nurturing mothers actually lick their pups more than the non-nurturing mothers, so the difference is transmitted through this epigenetic process.

now, we know in this particular case, and this takes us to a kim raised, this is their reaction between the parent and the offspring. if, for example, we chronically stressed a nurturing mother during her pregnancy, then once she gives birth, she shows a lower level of licking of her pups, in fact, no difference than a non-nurturing mother, and the offspring does not differ from the non-nurturing offspring and either the stress reactivity or frequency with which they lick their pups, so this tells us that it is the behavior of the parent that is actually transmitting effect of the social condition on to the offspring, which is directly similar to what kim was talking about with respect to poverty. now, we started to look at this in human situations. we can look in postmortem human brains, and when we do, we find

that individuals who were victims of child abuse show increased methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene, and they show decreased levels and stress gene activity in the hippocampus, that regulate our stress response. we know that kids who experience are moreversity reactive to threats and to stressors. this process, really regulated by the social environment -- and so it is different in many ways from the example that eric mentioned early on. isabel's case, infant rats that were deprived of care showed modifications of the epigenetic marks that were directly passed on to their offspring. we don't know if this necessarily involves this, but it is a fascinating possibility,

so we think this process of epigenetic regulation through environmental influence is critical for two reasons. the first is that these marks, including dna methylation in the human brain, associate with the risk for mental disorders, as well as for profiles of later brain injury. and i think the second point, and this is the point that was talkingwhat kim about early adversity that could , modify the epigenetic marks and increase the risk for mental disorders are far more proclaimed than we think. in the united states, for example, about 20% to 40% of the population has experienced a level of social adversity that is sufficient to alter epigenetic marks and to change the risks for mental disorders. in later life. charlie: so what does his race in terms the implications for research in the future?

mr. meaney: what type of mark are we seeing? eric underscore the idea that you are seeing the effects of poverty and early life. in fact, there are recent epigenetic studies that show we can see at the time of birth, so the mother's economic status during pregnancy can be associated with epigenetic modifications of birth, including genes involved in brain develop it. and there is no doubt that this process occurs post natively, and it is indeed reversible, but allows us to understand that beingsocial forces are embedded very early on in life. >> one of the one of the important issues to raise here, given how early these things start, economist uses expression of a now or pay more later, so if we don't do something early life than the costs later on can

, snowball in many respects. in fact, if i could just give one example of that, we started to look at a region of the chromosome on the telomere region. it is basically like a shoelace covering and protects the chromosome from all hits cell its cell divisions. we know that as we get older, we erode that region. it gets shorter. but what we have found is that children who grow up in profound neglect show a profoundly increased rate of telomere erosion, so here you see it, and in the you can see how you can start to chip away at that, and the chipping away of that region is so theof the element, question you will see in the next slide is how quickly do you do that erosion, so you will see the children in the institution over her the first years of life show a reduction, and will he find is that seems to be

associated with health outcomes. parents report kids with the greatest health issues are those with the shortest telomeres, as well, every found if these children are removed from these deprived environments early in life generally by the angel two, for the most part we can reverse them. i would like to come back to that question and a moment so we can show increases in iq, memory , and the ability to form relationships. this doesn't mean that the door closes at two. it means the longer you wait to take the child out of that deprived environment and put them in a good environment, the harder it is to get them back on an even keel. here is one dramatic example. we started to look at people at 12 with a serious form of mental health issue. these are children who were pretty heartless, torture animals, many people think it relationshipsin

earlier in life, but children when they were little and be more inclined, might be a psychopath when they are older. red is howe and high the rates are invoicing girls in these institutions, but it plummets when you put the kids into a good family. so this is an example of reversibility. if you leave them in those profoundly deprived environments, there is a high rate of kids exhibiting callous and emotional traits. you put them in good families, you almost get rid of it almost completely. charlie: and is there an age when the window closes and it is too late? mr. nelson: we do not know. plus or minus two and years as a critical point of element. does it matter, 3, 4, 5? thatnk my answer to question is we should still

expect some recovery, it would just be harder to get those kids back on an even keel the longer you wait. there is probably no point that is too late, but just imagine trying to open a heavy door that is closed most of the way. just the effort involved in opening up again. >> chuck's brilliant work focuses on situations of extreme orphanages, institutions, which thankfully, that level of adversity is quite rare in the u.s., so we have reason to half the size at least reversibility, the window may persist a look at longer for situations of less extreme adversity, and there is also quite a bit of work suggesting brain plasticity at least through adolescence. dr. kandel: it is not that rare. it was found in other contexts

as well, so this is not just unique to romania. >> and another point, charlie, there are children in china whose parents left them to go to work, kids growing up in profound poverty, so we have this continuum. the question is, where do cross that line before kids start suffering? ♪ [ alarm clock beeping ]

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charlie: we were talking about children and socioeconomic issues, exposure to environmental toxins, and they determine the effect on the brain. what is the right level to intervene? >> that is a great question, charlie. broadly, we think of these socioeconomic differences leading to these experiences, which, in turn, have effects on the brain and behavior, though so what is the right level at which to intervene? do we choose through school interventions, for example? now clearly quality early childhood education is of paramount importance, but if we are waiting until children start school, we are likely waiting until too late, because we know there are dramatic differences already by the time children start kindergarten. so taking a step back, what if we aim our interventions at the level of childhood experiences?

talking about the importance of reading with their children. interventions that aim to reduce harsh parenting, so again, there are a number of interventions that are focused on parenting, many of which are quite effective, but which also face a number of challenges. they tend to be expensive. they tend to be difficult to scale up, and they often face challenges in terms of the effect of the intervention dwindling once the intervention is over. so what if we thinking about taking a step back further and talking about changing policies that would actually directly reduce the rates of poverty in the u.s. or elsewhere? so with that kind of thinking, i am very excited to be part of a team of social scientists and neuroscientists who are planning and raising funds for the first randomized clinical trial of poverty reduction, and so while the premise is fairly ambitious or the goal is ambitious, it is the premise is pretty straightforward, so our plan is to recruit 1000 low-income

mothers nationally at the time they give birth, and randomize half to receive a large monthly income supplement, and the others would receive a moderate income monthly supplement, and the mothers would receive that every month for the first three years of their children's lives, when we know that the developing brain is tremendously malleable to the experience. so we are able to determine the effect of poverty on brains, and the results could have important implications for policies that could influence and affect millions of disadvantaged children. , do we seeric changes in the brain? can we localize it so we can see? dr. kandel: one of the things in the findings is the hippocampus is reduced. charlie: the size of the hippocampus? del: many of the findings

that were described here are based on various kinds of imaging. charlie: you can see the direct connection? dr. kandel: yes, yes, and one of the amazing things, you take the taxi drivers of london. unlike new york taxi drivers, theireally have to know way around the city. the hippocampus is really important to spatial memory. charlie: they have bigger hippocampuses? dr. kandel: the longer they drive, the larger the hippocampus becomes within limits, and when they quit, the hippocampus shrinks. never quit. [laughter] charlie: you are speaking to the converted. [laughter] dr. kandel: it is mutual. >> if i made though, the work in the poverty field is entirely correlational. we can show linkages or correlations between economic disadvantage and areas of the brain, but we cannot say for sure what is causing what yet, so this randomized trial we are planning will finally enable us to do that by actually

manipulating poverty, reducing poverty, and seeing if we can reverse or prevent some of this. charlie: what is fast track? >> it is direct intervention for risk of violence, keeping them from institutions. but there are some children who will slip through and have adverse experiences. with fast track, we work with children beginning at age five, to try to teach them skills to cope more effectively and to respond more competently when they are provoked, when they are threatened. one of the things we do in fasttrack is to use the metaphor of a stoplight as a way to help children learn these processes, so we paint red circles and yellow circles and green circles on playgrounds and desks, and what we do is we teach children, five-year-old children, rambunctious kindergartners, that when they experience a problem such as rolling them or being threatened, they should go down slowht, calm

, down, stop, count to 10, take a deep breath, whatever it is to slow them down, and with these high-risk kindergartners, if that is all we can teach them in the entire kindergarten year, that is a success, but the next step is after they are calm to teach them to go to the yellow light, and the yellow light is a thinking light, where you think of new perspectives and solutions. was that person really trying to be mean to me? if i respond, what will happen? we try to get them into a thinking, and, problem-solving mode, then when they come up with their best response, they come up to the green light to try it out, to go ahead, and if it works, great. if it doesn't, they go back to the red light and start over again. we have used this metaphor to teach these children the skills over a. period of five years.

we also teach parents parenting, to get them to intervene, and we intervened both with children and parents. we use the stoplight with parents so they may not abuse their children or engage in behaviors that they will regret later on. with fasttrack, we have conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate whether this kind of thing has impact. we took almost a thousand children from cities in the u.s. and developed and intervened with them in the fast-track program and found several kinds of impacts. first, after five years, when the children are now 10 years of age instead of five, those children who had been randomly assigned to receive the fast-track intervention showed less defensive processing, less of that pattern of hyperactivity and hypervigilance that i described earlier. that is very encouraging. the second finding is that we followed them up all the way into adulthood, and at age 25, we bring them back to the laboratory and expose them again to a provocation and a threat, and we measure their

testosterone release, and those children who 20 years before had experienced this fast-track intervention, those children showed less testosterone release, which means physiologically and hormonally we have calmed them down. ,not surprisingly given those that two findings, we show at age 25, at age 26, they showed less psychiatric disorder and less anxiety, less arrests, less time in prison, less costs to society in the form of mental health services and incarceration, so we believe it is beneficial to intervene beginning at a young age. eric, i'm listening to all this and thinking about this, the commitment we need in this nation to research. important studies taking place at every major university. they help us understand why we we the way we are and how

can change with early kinds of intervention that only come about because of smart research at great research universities and facilities around the world. we are almost out of time. i always like to do this. it gives somebut sense of what i was referring to in terms of the future. beginning with you, kim, tell us what you are looking at? ms. noble: how it can change children's brain development for the better? charlie: the question we have been asking all along. >> i would like to figure out how to reverse these bad effects these experience have early in life open up the critical , periods, interventions, and see if we can get the brain back on it even keel. i think that is very exciting, because we know something about the biology and genetics to open up the brain plasticity.

>> i would like to go to a question you raised early on, which is how is it some kids grow up in impoverished families and are productive and good and , resilient? what is the origin of resilience. what makes these people so resistant to these forces that otherwise do so much damage? charlie: and what do you think we might find? mr. meaney: that is interesting. the issue in many ways his, it begins in the genes. charlie: it begins in the genes. >> you can actually study genes that confer resilience to adversity, so when you look at kids even raised in the same , family, why it is that one of , it is exactly as eric suggests, there is a mixture of genes that render this individual more resilient. >> i would like to look at population impact, that is how to take this science, knowledge,

and interventions and to move the needle. at scale, to move the needle, at scale, to full populations, so that we can really transform our populations. >> and i am going to tag along on that note to say i am interested in how education policy and policy in general can actually change the environment in schools, and what we can do to help encourage schools to actually take on these issues. dr. kandel: it is so important for parents to realize how important their early interaction with the kids is. >> i would not what parents to come away with the thought that the only ingredient for resilience is a child's genetic makeup. tell me if you agree, michael, but i think parenting can really serve as a tremendous buffer for or against. >> i completely agree. as you and others have shown through parenting, but

even in the same family, you see those examples, and even in good families, you see kids who are wayward, and in dysfunctional families the opposite. , charlie: i am stunned with how we have studied it more, things we had not necessary thought about were pivotal in deciding factors with profound impact. dr. kandel: absolutely. this whole program is astonishing in a way. when you consider how social factors can have dramatic effect on the structure of the brain is , it is something we would not have thought about 40 or 50 years ago. charlie: what are we going to do next time? dr. kandel: biology. and the law. to what degree is witness testimony reliable? his memory reliable enough so that it can make decisions on this? it is a fascinating topic. charlie: all of the lawyers will be tuning in. >> exactly. charlie: thank you. i think we have learned a lot.

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