Inner city dangers linked to bad grades

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 18, 1998 (UPI) -- A Harvard researcher says a study of stone-age cultures may give clues to why many children in the inner city flunk out of school.

Psychiatrist Anneliese Pontius of the Harvard Medical School says living in the kind of constant danger common in warrior tribes and violent urban neighborhoods may change the way the brain processes information.

Fear makes people establish neurological ``short cuts'' that may let them react quickly to get out of harm's way, she says.

But in time, she says these neurological short cuts become habitual, and override the parts of the brain that control other more time consuming detail oriented skills, like learning to read.

In her research, Pontius studied groups of stone-age people from three different parts of the globe -- the Amazon, Indonesia and Ethiopia.

In each place, she found one war-like tribal group that lived in constant fear of attack from another tribe and compared it to a similar, peaceful group living nearby.

She then gave the members of these tribes simple tests in which they were asked to draw a face or to copy patterns.

The warriors all managed to copy the essential shapes, but they had trouble assessing the precise design. In the face drawing test, they got the features down, but in a crude manner in which there were few details. Pontius says the pictures resembled artwork of prehistoric people.

She says this ability to make out the rough outlines quickly, without wasting time in evaluation of details, may be essential in an environment where dodging predators and enemies is a fact of life.

Pontius says she believes children living in violent inner city neighborhoods may have a similar change in their brains, allowing them to quickly dodge street dangers.

But the circuit change may also make it impossible for them to concentrate and learn detail-oriented tasks like reading, she says.